Essays
By Julia Van Develder
Nov11
My St. Joseph statue has gone missing. Exactly how long he’s been gone, I’m not sure. Weeks, I suspect. The last I remember, he was wearing his cream-colored plastic robes (as always), his beard neatly trimmed, staring blankly out at the world from the middle shelf of the bookcase. True, he did look a bit uncomfortable sandwiched between the stacks of DVDs and boxes of Nicorette. But I imagined he was happy to be there, happy at least not to have been left behind at my old house, buried upside down in the front yard.
I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that that was the fate of my previous St. Josephs. One is buried in front of the pink house in Lagrangeville, the other in front of the house in Pleasant Valley—or un-Pleasant Valley, as my daughters used to call it. It was my intention to dig them up and bring them with me, but in both cases, I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d buried them.
So, yes—I used them, if that’s what you’re thinking. I enlisted their aid to help me sell those houses, and once they did their part, I abandoned them. The best they can hope for at this point is that some archeologist centuries from now will dig them up and make wild conjectures about the belief systems of the peoples who once thickly populated this fertile valley.
But this time, I had two witnesses to the burial, one of whom paced off the distance to the burial spot from the front walk, so I knew where to dig the day before the closing. It took a bit of poking around with the shovel, but I found him, all right--washed the mud off of him and brought him to my temporary abode with the intention of planting him right side up, facing in, in the front yard of my new house, when and if I succeed in purchasing it.
You never heard of this bizarre ritual? When you want to sell your house, you’re supposed to bury a St. Joseph statue upside down, facing away from your house. If you want St. Joe to watch over your house and protect you and your family, you bury him right side up, facing toward the house.
Mind you—I don’t really believe any of this. I’m not a Catholic and never was. I’m not even a Christian, although I was raised as one. In fact, my parents were missionaries when I was a little kid. And then, when I was a bigger kid, we moved back to the States and my father went back to school and got his doctorate and became a teacher of preachers. For a while, in my teens, I tormented my parents by declaring myself an atheist. In college, I switched to agnosticism, and after college, Judaism. Twenty years later, after my divorce, I almost became a Quaker. I like the Quakers a lot and attended silent meetings for a couple of years. I quit, though, when they asked me to sign up for real. I’m just not much of a joiner. Plus the committee work was killing me. So now, I’m a Buddhist. Real Buddhists probably wouldn’t consider me one, but whatever. This story isn’t about my spiritual journey; it’s about my St. Joseph statue.
In case you’re wondering why I engaged in this practice if I didn’t actually believe in the power of an inanimate object to influence the outcome of my real estate transactions: I just thought—couldn’t hurt. And in point of fact, it seems to have helped. The first time, I sold my house to the first people who came to look at it. The second time, I can’t remember how many people looked at the house, but not many. It sold within three weeks. And this time? In a terrible market? The house was only on the market for a week—sold to the second person who came to look. If that doesn’t make a case for St. Joseph, I don’t know what does. And clearly, St. Joseph doesn’t care what you believe. He’s an equal opportunity saint.
I can’t remember who told me about St. Joseph, but I do remember feeling a little nervous about buying one of these statues. I purchased the first one long before the advent of Ebay, when people still bought things in stores. Near where I worked, there was a strip mall that had a store devoted exclusively to selling Christian paraphernalia. I went in—the shelves were a little bare. The proprietor, a middle-aged man who might best be described as “beige” sat on a stool behind the counter, reading a dog-eared copy of The Thorn Birds. “Can I help you?” he asked.
“Just looking,” I lied. I was pretty sure he would disapprove of what I intended to do with this statue, so I didn’t want to just come right out and asked for it. I checked out the Jesuses and the Virgin Marys. There were a couple of dusty plastic crèches that I pretended to find fascinating. I didn’t see any St. Josephs, but I didn’t really know what he looked like.
“If you don’t see what you’re looking for, I can order it,” said the proprietor.
“Actually—have you got a St. Joseph?” I asked.
“Selling your house?” he answered.
On the shelf behind him was his stash of St. Josephs, about a dozen little boxes neatly stacked. He gave me one and rang me up. It was less than $5, I think.
Since he didn’t seem to be offended, I thought I might as well pick his brain while I was at it. I asked him how deep I was supposed to bury him: “Oh, a couple of inches ought to do it.” I asked him whether I was supposed to say “Hail Joseph!” or anything like that: “Hail Joseph?” I asked him if it worked for non-Catholics: “I suppose it might work better if you’re Catholic,” he said, “but I don’t really know. I don’t really believe in it.” I must have looked crestfallen because he hastened to add: “But some people swear by it. I sell a lot of these.”
I can’t remember where I got the second St. Joseph, but the most recent one I purchased on Ebay. He came with instructions advising the purchaser to get his/her house ready for market before planting the statue—in other words, not to put the whole burden on a piece of plastic. The instructions ended with this endearing multicultural slogan: “Trust in Allah, but tie up your camels.”
I was quite proud of myself for having dug up St. Joseph and brought him with me. It assuaged my guilt for having abandoned his predecessors. And I started to build a little narrative about the future around him. Maybe now I could stay put. I’d plant him right side up in my new home and live happily ever after.
The immediate problem was that I didn’t have a new home to move into. The house sold so quickly that I hadn’t figured out yet what to do next—rent? buy? move away? stay here? get a job? jump off the Mid-Hudson Bridge? So many choices!
Luckily for me, I have some good friends who offered to let me and my two labradoodles live in their basement while I figured out my next move. “Basement” doesn’t really do the space justice. It is in the basement, but it has high ceilings and big windows looking out on their pond. They said they’d been planning all along to make it into an apartment, and as soon as I said “Yes!” they built me a patio and put in a kitchenette. “And you really should have your own entrance,” they said. Yes—very good friends. So they ordered a lovely Pella patio door and arranged for their carpenter to install it.
Let me tell you—this guy is no ordinary carpenter. He was in the process of converting their garage into a “man cave” for the husband when I moved into the basement. John is his first name, and his last name is Italian. Not “John Italian,” but John with an Italian last name that I can’t remember at the moment.
If you want to know how terrific a carpenter John is, just ask him. Actually, you don’t even need to ask. All you need to do is spend about five minutes with him and he’ll volunteer that information. He’s won awards for his work, both in this country and the “home country”—Costruttore dell’Ano, which is Italian for “Builder of the Year.” Plus? He’s a published author. In case you didn’t know, he’s written many, many short stories that have been published in the New Yorker and similarly prestigious magazines. “I should apologize for how good I am,” he told me with a straight face.
I offered to help paint the man cave to get it ready for a visit from the building inspector, which is how I came to spend an afternoon with John the Magnificent. I’d been in his holiness’s presence for about 15 minutes when he complimented me on my painting skills and said that this was why we needed a woman president and that we’d be a lot better off with someone like Sarah Palin in the White House.
I was confused for a moment. So that she could paint it? What, what?
When I realized that he was serious, I figured I’d better keep my mouth shut. He sermonized for about half an hour straight. Told me that he lived in an apartment in Poughkeepsie and that people couldn’t believe that he, with his brains and talent and good looks, didn’t own his own house. But he’d made some bad decisions in his youth—alcohol was mentioned briefly. Fortunately, God had saved him. And that was why (he said) he was a creationist—because, how could so perfect an invention as the human being have been anything other than a divine creation, set down on this earth fully formed in God’s own image?
My head was spinning by now—maybe it was the paint fumes. But. I just couldn’t let that go, even though I knew I should. “Have you been to the Grand Canyon?” I asked innocently.
“Oh, yes!” he said, coping on immediately to my drift. “That’s why I am a creationist and an evolutionist.” He proceeded to explain that he believes in evolution when it comes to rocks and stuff, but he believes that humans—specifically, Adam and Eve--were was created by God in more or less their current perfect form and plunked down on a planet that had been evolving for a few billion years. I may have gotten a few of the details wrong, but that is the gist.
I didn’t say anything else, I swear, except “Uh-huh,” and “Interesting!” But I’m pretty sure he knew I thought he was a nincompoop.
Which is probably why he stole St. Joseph.
That—or maybe my bumper stickers drove him to it. After the rapture, can I have your car?
He’s the only person, other than my gracious hosts, who had access to my room in the basement. The lovely Pella patio door he installed is right next to the bookcase where St. Joseph stood, waiting patiently to be taken to his new home.
Which day did God make all the fossils? That one probably really got his goat. Or maybe it was Halliburton got your Medicare.
I can’t prove it, of course. Nor do I want to. But it is kind of ironic, isn’t it? That a so-called Christian would break one of the Ten Commandments? For what? To rescue a plastic statue from a heathen?
Since Catholicism is one of the few religions I haven’t tried, I’m not sure what the Catholics would have to say about this matter. I do, unfortunately, know what the Buddhists would say: It’s my fault.
And not because I thought derogatory thoughts about John. I’ll get to pay for that one eventually, but this one—the theft of my St. Joseph—has to be the consequence of a similar act on my part: taking something that didn’t belong to me.
According to the Buddhist way of thinking, nothing can arise in your experience that you haven’t created by your own word, thought, or deed. In other words, nothing can happen to you that you haven’t done to somebody else sometime or another.
So let me see…have I ever stolen somebody else’s St. Joseph statue? Ummm—no? I would never do that. And if you think I’m going to list all the things I did steal, think again. The last time I checked, confession was strictly a Catholic thing.
Besides, digging up daylilies from the side of the road and transplanting them to other places that need a spot of color—your yard, for instance—is not stealing. It’s spreading beauty, which is a good thing, a mitzvah.
As for my St. Joseph, I hope he’s in a good place, and I sincerely hope that John will someday have a home of his own to bury him in front of. Frankly? I’m just relieved that he didn’t take the iMac.
By Julia Van Develder
Nov02
To tell you the truth? I kind of knew better. The signs were clearly posted: no parking without a permit, violators will be towed.
But it was late on a Saturday night, and my daughter Meredith and I had just spent six hours: sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, driving in pouring rain, getting lost in south Boston. My daughter Rachel, whom we’d come to visit, came down from her fifth-floor walk-up to meet us, and we pulled into the driveway next to her building because there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to pull over.
As it happened, that driveway led to a perfectly charming and practically empty parking lot.
“Do they tow?” I asked, eying the signs posted at regular intervals around the perimeter.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never heard of anyone getting towed.”
“It’ll probably be okay for the night,” I said, “but we’ll have to move it in the morning.”
And it probably would have been okay if I’d moved it in the morning. And it did occur to me, however briefly, before we took the T downtown for lunch.
Walking back from the T hours later, I could see her building on the corner and, through the trees, the parking lot in which my white Subaru Forester was no longer parked.
“Guys,” I said to the girls, “they towed me.” In unison: “Oh, no!”
Oh, yes. It’s funny now--now that I have my car back and I’m back home in New York. But at the moment, all I could think about was the hell I was pretty sure my afternoon was going to turn into. “The good news is, it’s early,” said Rachel. We had hours of daylight left to try to find my car and get it out of hock.
As luck would have it, just as we were turning into the driveway to go see where the car wasn’t, a tow truck came barreling down on us. It didn’t have my Subaru or anybody else’s in tow, but it seemed like a safe bet that the big guy with the shaved head sitting in the driver’s seat would have a clue. We flagged him down.
In a Boston accent as thick as an Irish sweater: “Yep. We towed it this morning. Don’t you people read signs? It says it right there, monitored 24 hours.”
I asked him what I had to do to get my car back. He shook his head. “You’re gonna have to take a taxi all the way to Brighton,” he said. The girls and I looked at each other in dismay. Brighton? It couldn’t be that far, could it?
He radioed his base. “I got the lady who owns that white Subaru here, and she wants to know how much it’s gonna cost her.” He turned back to us. “$136, and you gotta pay cash.” Ka-ching. The cost of my little weekend jaunt to Boston was adding up.
“Will I be able to find my way back here?” I asked, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. He shook his head. Two or three times. “I can give you directions, but it’s tricky.”
And then he looked at our three sorrowful faces and took pity on us. “Tell you what—throw me a little extra, and I’ll take you over there. I’m not supposed to let anybody ride in the truck, but what the hell. I’ve gotta go back over there anyhow.”
He promised to take me to an ATM along the way, so I climbed into the cab and waved goodbye to my two lovely daughters standing forlornly on the curb. “She’ll be back in an hour and a half,” he told them, “two hours tops.”
I had a flash of anxiety—what was I doing? Wasn’t Boston the town where there were massacres and stranglers and things like that? I tried to pay attention to where we were going so I’d be able to find my way back, but it became obvious within minutes that “tricky” was a euphemism for “damn near impossible” unless you were a native or equipped with GPS. Coursing down parkways, zigzagging a maze of streets, whirling through roundabouts—I postponed worrying about getting back for later.
It’s amazing, isn’t it, how quickly we human beings adjust to misfortune? If you’re in a car accident and your car is totaled, you feel “lucky” to be alive, and somehow you overlook how unlucky you were to get in an accident in the first place.
So now I was feeling quite fortunate and grateful to my bald companion. In the game of getting my car back, he’d advanced me at least three or four moves and saved me hours of aggravation.
“You think this is a good job,” he accused me, “it’s not. People get mad at us. All the time. One of our guys? Got assaulted last week. People should read the signs. It’s private property. How would you feel if you were paying $300 a month for parking, and you came home, and somebody was in your spot? You’d be pretty pissed off, right?”
“Right,” I agreed. He said he’d be lucky to break $25K this year, said fortunately he was living with his girlfriend and only had to pay half the rent, said he wasn’t complaining—he was glad to have a job.
“Have you lived in Boston your whole life?” I asked him.
“My whole life,” he said. “Fact, I’ve only been out of the state one time.”
“Really!” I said. I mean, that’s a pretty amazing fact in this migratory day and age. And the next question was obvious—where’d he go that one time? I imagined a hunting trip in the Poconos or a pilgrimage to Disneyland with the wife and kids.
“Don’t get scared or nothing,” he said, which of course got me a little scared. “Ten years. Federal penitentiary. Near Plattsburg.”
“Oh, my,” I said.
“I used to do stickups,” he said cheerfully, “banks, grocery stores.”
“Wow,” I said, thinking that the upcoming stop at the ATM might be less routine than I’d imagined.
“Yeah—the last time, five minutes after the stickup, I was in cuffs. Turned out my girlfriend at the time was an informant for the FBI.”
His two-way beeped and he picked up the handset and launched into a Click-and-Clack routine with his boss about a mechanical problem with one of the trucks in the fleet, in the middle of which my cell phone rang. I answered it—it was Rachel—but meantime he was gesturing vehemently at me to silence the phone. It took me a minute to figure out that I wasn’t supposed to be there, and if his boss heard me, he’d get in trouble.
“Mom?” said Rachel, very earnest, “Now, don’t argue. Meredith and I talked it over, and we want to contribute to the cost of the towing, so—“
I cupped my hand around the cell phone and whispered hoarsely, “Rach—I…can’t…talk…right…now.”
“Mom? Are you okay? Mom! What’s the matter?” I glanced over at my bald friend. “I’m…okay,” I whispered, “can’t…talk.” And closed the phone, and then, with a little prayer to a god in whom I don’t believe, turned it off. I just hoped Rachel wasn’t calling the cops to report a kidnapped mother.
When he got off the radio with his boss, I asked him how he got into a life of crime in the first place. “I was always bad,” he said breezily, “from the time I was a kid. Foster homes, juvi. I straightened out for a while. Had a pretty good job, working over at the Gilette factory, pulling down $75K. I had a wife, three boys.” He was telling me all of this stuff in the same tone of voice that I might use to explain how I made some not-so-great decisions during the dot-com bust, sort of a “that’s life” tone. “But then I got into cocaine. That’s when I started doing stickups. Part of the problem is I like danger, see. The sound of sirens gets me goin’. I had a bulletproof vest, the whole thing.” He swerved over and pulled up in front of a Chase bank. It took me a couple of seconds to remember that I was supposed to get out and use the ATM.
We hadn’t specified what was meant by “a little extra,” and I don’t have any sense of what’s expected in situations like these. How much do you tip a former bank robber who’s doing you a big favor? So I asked him, “Is $20 going to be enough?” figuring his face would tell the truth. He looked perfectly satisfied with that, happy, in fact. “Sure!” he said. So I got the dough, hopped back in the cab, and off we went.
He told me that after he started robbing banks, he quit his day job at Gilette and cashed in his 401K and gave half to his wife. “I knew I was going down. And I just wanted to be able to look back and say that I did at least one thing good. So I told her to take the money and get away from me, and get the boys away from me. Told her to find a decent guy and get a new life. And she did. She moved out to Wisconsin where her sister lives, met a guy. The boys are doing good. Two of them are in college, the youngest is still in high school.”
“Do you ever get to see them?”
“Nah—it’s better this way. I was a bad influence.”
By now, we were in a peopleless area with derelict warehouses and scary-looking industrial buildings, the kind of place where they shoot the really disturbing episodes of Law and Order SVU. He pulled over and pointed up ahead to an opening in a cinderblock wall. “See over there? That’s where your car is,” he said. “Go in there, pay the girl in the booth, and when you come out, you can follow me back. I have to go back over there anyway.” I gave him the $20 and thanked him. Profusely, I hope, although I can’t really remember what I said. I was too busy imagining myself walking through that gap and getting mown down by James Gandolfini et al.
But sure enough, there was my little white car, in amongst the Land Rovers and BMWs whose owners were no doubt freaking out trying to track them down. When I pulled out of the lot, my bald friend was waiting up the street. I never would have been able to find my way back to Jamaica Plains without him. I would have had to stop somewhere and buy a map, or put the girls on speaker phone and let them google-map me back. I followed him through Brighton and Brookline to Boston, where he pointed out my daughter’s building and waved goodbye.
Obviously, he hadn’t needed to go back to the towing lot, because he didn’t do anything there but drop me off. He probably didn’t need to go back over to Boston either. I don’t think it was about the $20. Maybe he was just bored. Or maybe he just had a streak of goodness in him that years of craziness hadn’t managed to eradicate.
As for me, I counted myself lucky. I could have had a boring afternoon, sitting around acting motherly. Instead, I got this great story. $156, and worth every penny.
By Julia Van Develder
Jan13
In his controversial 2002 book A New Kind of Science, mathematician and MacArthur winner Stephen Wolfram puts forward the theory that everything is a computation. Everything—the entire physical universe, including you, me, and everyone we know—is the product of a few simple rules played out ad infinitum. We’re talking mathematical rules here, as in: if A, then B multiplied by C equals F.
So. Take leaves on trees, for example. There are thousands of leaf shapes, and thousands of variations on those shapes. In other words—complexity. And it turns out that all of those iterations can be generated by a mathematical rule played out ad infinitum.
These rules are called cellular automata (which, I think, refers to the discrete cells on a page of graph paper, not biological cells), and they’re the subject of intense study and speculation among physicists, biologists, mathematicians, and other scientists because they show how extraordinarily complex and unpredictable patterns can arise from the application of very simple rules. (If you’re interested in looking at an example of a cellular atomaton, google the Game of Life, a fun little automaton developed by John Conway, a British mathematician. For a very readable analysis of Wolfram’s ideas, get a hold of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul by Rudy Rucker.)
What interests me is not the math (I hate math!), but the idea that there may be a similar principle operating on a moral or spiritual level—that the entire spiritual universe is the product of a few simple “rules” played out ad infinitum. Spiritual automata, if you will.
Take the situation in Gaza today. The situation is as complex and tangled as any highly charged political conflict the world has ever seen. You could devote your entire life to becoming an expert on any one aspect of the situation. You could become a historian of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. You could look at the conflict from the perspective of a political scientist, an economist, a sociologist, a scholar of religion. You could build an entire career on your expertise and become a Middle Easternist at a well known university or in a think tank or at the State Department or at the CIA.
You could. Or you could simply state the obvious: violence begets violence. The violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is so exponential at this point that even if both sides laid down their weapons today, it would take centuries for the consequences of their prior aggression to play themselves out.
So the spiritual automaton would be something like this: If you kill another human being because s/he is a member of a group that you hate, you create the possibility that a group you belong to will be the target of hateful aggression. The automaton couldn’t be something as straightforward as, if you kill another human being, you will be killed, because that would effectively eliminate hateful aggression in the world, and we know that’s not the case.
But there’s something there. Violence does beget violence. Who doesn’t know that?
There is a corollary spiritual automata that goes something like this: If you are the victim of hateful aggression and you refrain from retaliation, you create the possibility of a nonviolent future. Every major religion—Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Confuscianism, and, yes, Islam—has codified a version of this spiritual automata—turn the other cheek. So why do we still have wars, most of them fueled by religious intolerance?
Because the automaton is simple, but its outcome is not. Turning the other cheek doesn’t guarantee that you personally will be spared (Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.) or that you will be immediately victorious or that peace will reign on the earth. At least—not in the short term. Not until it’s played out ad infinitum. Plus, even if you have the courage to initiate the nonviolence automata, it’s going to take time before the violence automata plays itself out. It is, however, literally the only hope for change in the direction of peace.
Of all the world religions, Buddhism seems to come the closest to describing something like this idea of spiritual automata. According to Buddhist thought, every single thing you do, think, or say plants a karmic seed. We are each planting these seeds at the rate of about 60 per second. How the Buddhist thinkers came to this number, I don’t know. And whether or not it’s accurate I have no way of knowing. Maybe it’s only 10 per second, or 1 per second, or 10 per day. That’s still a lot.
The seeds are deposited in the alaya—the spiritual ground, so to speak. And when the conditions are right, those seeds sprout. So many seeds are being planted that there’s no way, even if you are a highly trained holy person, to control them all. However, even those of us at the bottom rung of the spiritual ladder can practice controlling the most basic ones. We can, for example, not retaliate.
Let’s take an example from the playground. Bobby hits Billy. First, let’s examine Billy’s victimhood. Is he a victim? Perhaps he never did anything to Bobby. But has he ever engaged in an act of aggression? Is there a five-year-old who hasn’t?
For the sake of argument, let’s agree that the effect that Billy is seeing in his own life (getting hit) was caused by his own previous aggressive behavior (a seed he planted in the alaya). At this moment, Billy has a choice. If he retaliates, he plants another seed of aggression that will sprout in the future. If he restrains himself, he creates a different future. He may still have some other aggressive seeds waiting to sprout, but at least he won’t be planting any new ones.
At the moment of choice, what is it that creates the possibility of doing something different? Christianity would say that this is the moment of grace, of divine intervention. Buddhism calls it basic goodness, bodhichitta. Christianity posits an external goodness that reaches in and touches the basically corrupt being and changes it. Buddhism posits a core of goodness, or intelligence, within the human being that arises at such a moment.
I suspect that Christianity characterizes this as a moment of divine intervention because it is, at first glance, so contrary to “human nature.” When we are hurt, our first impulse is to lash out, to protect ourselves, to reduce the aggressor to ashes if possible. What could restrain us at such a moment other than God, or if not God then the teachings that have been transmitted to us about what God wants from us. At such a moment, you want to kill the other person, but the voice of your Sunday school teacher speaks up in your mind and tells you to turn the other cheek.
Buddhism questions whether this impulse to retaliate is “human nature,” or all of human nature. We can think of less dire moments where our human nature is to refrain from retaliation. Say, for example, that your baby is teething and in pain and his/her flailing arms land a blow to your nose, and it hurts! You don’t then punch your baby, do you? You are in pain, but at the same time you feel compassion for the suffering of your child. And this compassion is as much a part of our “human nature” as the other part that desires revenge. Which impulse becomes stronger depends on which one we exercise.
But the end result is the same, isn’t it? Whether you are a Buddhist or a Christian, the idea is that you are to refrain from retaliation.
There is a difference. In Christianity, we are advised to turn the other cheek, but there is a suggestion that this is the stuff saints and holy people are made of, not ordinary folks like us, and not people in the real world, where terrorists crash planes into skyscrapers. Furthermore, if you do turn the other cheek, you can now at least have the satisfaction of thinking that you are superior to the person who attacked you.
From a Buddhist perspective, the rationale for turning the other cheek is much more practical. You do it not because you are holy or better than the other person but because you are tired of getting slapped, and you know that if you retaliate, you will most certainly get slapped again at some point in the future.
One thing I like about the Buddhist notion of how the world works is that it applies to everybody. The rules, just like physical rules, are universal. The laws of gravity apply to everyone, whether you’re a Taoist or a Muslim, whether you live in Russia or Spain. It makes sense to me that spiritual rules are universal as well—that whether you are a Buddhist or a Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu or an atheist, the same spiritual automata are at work.
We might not know what every one of these automata are, and we might not be able to unravel the complexities of how they all interact, but we do know what the main ones are. In fact, every single one of them derives from one primary, universal automata: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you. Confucianism, Analects of Confucius, 15:23
This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you. Hinduism, Mahabharata 5:1517
None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself. Islam, Al-Nawawi’s Forty Hadiths
A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated. Jainism, Sutrakritanga 1.11.33
Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. Buddhism, Udana-Varga 5:18
As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. Christianity, Luke 6:31, King James Version
And if thine eyes be turned towards justice, choose thou for thy neighbor that which thou choosest for thyself. Baha’i, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Judaism, Leviticus 19:18
Don’t do things you wouldn’t want to have done to you. British Humanist Society
Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss. Taoism, T’ai Shang Kan Ying P’ien
Whatever is disagreeable to yourself do not do unto others. Zoroastrianism, Shayast-na Shayast 13:29
By Julia Van Develder
Nov17
If I had the whole parenting thing to do over again, I would do at least one thing differently: I wouldn’t praise my children.
Parenting styles and ideologies come and go, and every new generation of parents finds ways to improve on the job their parents did. My mother’s generation bottle-fed their babies because that was the modern, “scientific” way to parent. My generation went back to breastfeeding because by then the science had shown that breast milk is the ideal food for human infants.
People in my generation put their babies to sleep on their stomachs to prevent them from choking to death on their own spit-up; today’s parents put them to sleep on their backs to prevent Sudden Infant Death syndrome.
Bottle or breast, cloth or paper, crib or cradle or family bed--prevailing views on issues like these seem to do a 180 every generation or so. But there’s one parenting tenet that has become so entrenched that no one, at least in our culture, seems to question it, and that’s the belief in positive reinforcement as the best practice for encouraging appropriate behavior and self esteem in our children. This dogma, rooted in B.F. Skinner’s work on operant conditioning, was popularized and spread by America’s all-time favorite parenting guru, Dr. Benjamin Spock.
At this point, we have lots of evidence that positive reinforcement doesn’t create self-esteem. We’ve all known parents who bent over backwards to recognize and praise their children for anything and everything from learning to tie their shoes to sharing their toys. “Wow! You shared! That’s so great! I’m proud of you!” Yet many of those children have grown up to become adults who are just as plagued by self-doubt and self-loathing as previous generations who were raised under the “spare-the-rod, spoil-the-child” paradigm.
Some critics of modern child-rearing practices argue that the failure to produce the intended result is because praise is meted out too easily, without children having had to really earn it. The children know it’s bogus, but they still come to expect it as their due. Then when they get to the real world, the rug gets rolled up with them inside of it.
I’m sure there’s some truth to that, and I’m also sure that Dr. Spock would wince at some of the misapplications of the principle of positive reinforcement. But I think the problem with the positive reinforcement model is more a matter of structure than application. It has a fatal flaw, which is that it inevitably sets up its opposite--criticism. Even if you’re getting more praise than criticism, even if you’re getting only praise, your sense of self-worth becomes a conditional commodity. You learn to feel good about yourself only insofar as your behavior generates praise rather than criticism.
When I was growing up, my older brother was constantly in trouble. I remember sitting on the basement steps in our little brick house in the suburbs, listening to him get yelled at upstairs in the kitchen because he stole my allowance money to buy a kite. My parents were church people. My father was a seminarian, preparing for his ordination. Stealing was one of the Big Ten no-nos.
The unconscious decision I made was not to be like him---not to be bad, not to ever do anything that would cast me out of the warm circle of parental approval. I dedicated myself to being good, worked overtime to avoid criticism. I was a good student. I was obedient. I was helpful and considerate. And my dear sweet parents praised me for it. (And praise does work, by the way—according to controlled experiments, verbal praise is actually much more effective than tangible rewards in shaping behavior.)
That made me an easy child. But it also set me up for some not-so-great relationships as an adult. I was easily controlled by my fear of disapproval and rejection. When you’re a praise junkie, one critical comment or even a disapproving glance can send you spiraling down into a pit of despair, and you will do just about anything to claw your way back to emotional safety. Prostrate yourself, humiliate yourself, abuse yourself—whatever it takes to earn forgiveness and be reinstated in the “Good” category.
Why would an otherwise sane adult be paralyzed by fear of criticism?
One persuasive explanation is offered by Paul MacLean (now deceased, former head of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the National Institute of Mental Health) who developed an evolutionary (and controversial) theory known as the triune brain theory. (See The Evolutionary Neuroethology of Paul MacLean: Convergences and Frontiers, 2002.) One of the principal complaints among neuroscientists is that his model is too simplistic, and I am about to add insult to injury by providing a ridiculously simplified version of it. Basically, MacLean’s theory is that the brain comprises three parts:
The R-complex, also known as the “reptilian brain,” includes the brain stem and the cerebellum and controls the muscles, balance, and autonomic functions, such as respiration.
The limbic system, also known as the “mammalian brain,” includes the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the hippocampus, and is the source of emotions (responses to pleasure and pain) and instincts.
The neocortex, also known as the “cerebral cortex,” is found in the brains of higher mammals and is the source of higher-order cognitive skills, like reasoning.
These three components are connected and function as one, but not always smoothly. Take the limbic system, for example, where pain and pleasure and their attendant emotions are recorded. When you experience pain, the limbic system doesn’t automatically refer this experience to the neocortex for analysis.
In mammals that do not have a highly developed neocortex, what happens in the limbic system, stays in the limbic system. Let’s say, for example, that a puppy is mistreated—a child kicks the puppy or pulls its ears. The puppy feels pain and fear. If that experience is repeated enough times, you’ll eventually have a dog that “isn’t good with children.”
The dog can’t differentiate temporally or spatially. It can’t say to itself, “Hey, that was a different kid, and it was a long time ago, when I was a helpless little puppy. Now I’m a big strong dog. I don’t need to be afraid of kids.” No—the dog’s brain says, “Kids--BAD.”
The ability to differentiate is the province of the neocortex, the reasoning brain. But the neocortex and the limbic system are not very well integrated, so in human beings, just as in dogs or other mammals , the painful or pleasurable experiences recorded in the limbic system continue to trigger the same emotional response unless the neocortex intervenes. How many Americans, for example, say, “Muslims—TERRORISTS,” and fail to use their capacity to reason to differentiate between 19 hijackers and a world population of one billion Muslims? How many veterans have a fight-or-flight reaction to the sound of gunshots during hunting season, or to fireworks on the Fourth of July?
The good news is that the neocortex can intervene. In this respect, human beings seem to be a unique species. The bad news is that most human beings don’t have access to this important information and remain trapped in the reactive cycles generated by their limbic systems. You might be fifty years old and still not realize that the person calling the shots is the scared five-year-old inside you.
So what does all this have to do with parenting techniques? The problem with positive reinforcement (and punishment as well) is that it conditions behavior via the limbic system without bringing the neocortex in on the deal. Kid does something “good,” parents praise kid, praise triggers feelings of happiness and security. It’s no different, really, from a dog learning to sit in order to get a milkbone.
What happens if praise isn’t forthcoming? If praise is withheld? In this system, the absence of praise isn’t neutral. It’s a negative reinforcement in the sense that it will push the child to double his/her efforts to regain the pleasurable feelings.
By the time the kid becomes an adult, s/he presumably will have the cognitive skills to understand why certain behaviors are or aren’t conducive to social well being. But this more mature understanding doesn’t automatically undo the damage at the limbic level. Whenever you find yourself overreacting to something or someone, the likelihood is that your limbic system is in charge.
But if we don’t use positive reinforcement, how do we raise children to do the right thing and also feel good about themselves?
A possible answer, I think, comes from the East.
There’s a famous story about the Dalai Lama and the concept of self esteem. Here is Jon Kabat-Zinn’s version of the story (Wherever You Go, There You Are, pp. 162-3):
“In conversations with the Dalai Lama during a meeting in Dharamasala in 1990, he did a double take when a Western psychologist spoke of low self-esteem. The phrase had to be translated several times for him into Tibetan, although his English is quite good. He just couldn’t grasp the notion of low self-esteem, and when he finally understood what was being said, he was visibly saddened to hear that so many people in America carry deep feelings of self-loathing and inadequacy.
Such feelings are virtually unheard of among the Tibetans. They have all the severe problems of refugees from oppression living in the Third World, but low self-esteem is not one of them.”
How is it that Buddhists don’t suffer from low self-esteem? This is an interesting, complicated question that I won’t presume to answer. But I recently watched a film that offers some clues--The Cave of the Yellow Dog, written and directed by Mongolian filmmaker Byambasuren Davaa.
Davaa wanted to record a way of life that is disappearing—the nomadic life of sheep herders in Mongolia. She used a real family, a Buddhist family, in The Cave of the Yellow Dog to tell the story of a little girl, Nansal, who finds a dog and wants to keep it, despite her father’s insistence that she take it back to the cave where she found it.
This isn’t a documentary about Buddhism or about childrearing practices in Mongolia, but it nevertheless opens a window onto a way of approaching parenting that is subtly and profoundly different from our way in the West.
Example: At the beginning of the movie, Nansal, the oldest daughter—seven or eight years old?--is coming back to her family after months of being away at boarding school. That evening, hanging around in the yurt, she asks her father if he would like to see her school work. He says yes. She shows him her workbook and points out a gold star she got on one assignment (the very icon of our system of positive reinforcement!). The father runs his fingers over the star and then points to the next page, which also has a star, and says, “And another one.” He doesn’t jump up and down praising her. Neither does he minimize her accomplishment. He’s just with her.
The family has three children--two girls and a boy who’s around two years old—and there are many moments in the film where we see the parents parent. There are dramatic moments (such as when Nansal is lost in a storm) and moments of conflict (such as when her father tells her to take the dog back to the cave) and moments of obvious love and affection between the members of this family. But there isn’t a single instance of praise or criticism, reward or punishment—even when Nansal disobeys her father.
Here in the West, the praise-criticize habit is so entrenched and so pervasive that it’s extraordinarily challenging to stop doing it. And then that becomes another thing we use to criticize ourselves---“OMG, I praised my kid…I’m such a bad parent!” But it is possible to relate to people, including our own children, without making them good or bad. And you don’t have to become a Buddhist to try loving people, including yourself, just because we exist and not because of anything we do or don’t do.
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