Connect, Don't Separate the Heart from the Intellect

In the wake of World Kindness Day I’d like to post a friendly reminder that love wins! 

Many of us have been conditioned to believe that

"If you love, you are considered frivolous and simple. If generous and altruistic, you are considered suspect. If forgiving, you are considered weak. If trusting, you are considered a fool. If you try to be all of those things, people are sure you are phony." (Leo Buscaglia)

I've been a high school teacher for almost 28 years. Here is what I can tell you: Now more than ever, adolescents want an education that helps them to improve their internal worlds while promoting opportunities to better their external worlds. They recognize that wanting to live a good and meaningful life does not make you a naive idealist or a biased optimist. It makes you human.

Classes and schooling can provide adolescents the tools and opportunities to put their education towards a purpose higher than just themselves. Research shows, acting for the benefit of another or the greater good is an incredible source of wellbeing and personal happiness.

Noted psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown that people are wired to be inspired. When we see people do good things for others we are moved to tears or feel a warm glow in our chests. He defined this as moral elevation or a “warm, uplifting feeling that people experience when they see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness and compassion.” Various social psychological experiments have shown that when we are exposed to moral examples and experience elevation, this can lead to various prosocial behaviors. 

In everyday life, we witness cooperative, pro-social behavior. We also witness selfless behavior. When we experience the fight, fright, or freeze response activated in extreme situations we feel danger and a desire to survive. 

However, our desire to survive and fight for our lives also includes fighting for others. Often this is seen when tragedy strikes. Communities can and often do arise in disaster.

In her book, A Paradise Built in Hell Rebecca Solnit examines many disasters throughout history. For example, the 1906 earthquake and fires in San Francisco, the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, the events of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. The disasters are different in their causes but her research and writing reveal the altruistic responses to them are consistently the same. The best of human nature often emerges in tragedy, not the worst. 

Choosing to believe in the possibilities of the human spirit doesn’t make you a naive idealist. It makes you human. It cheapens our humanity to suggest to young people that the human condition is fixed and inherently destructive. 

Teaching and modeling behavior that encourages children to open their hearts to the world, to others, and to themselves is the most worthy and important endeavor we can provide to them as adults.  

George Packer has written recently in The Atlantic about how adults are turning schools into battlefields with children being the casualties. Packer wrote,

“Adults keep telling you [young people] the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.”

Yep, the world does look and feel broken. A global pandemic, war, systemic societal issues, and perennial human problems and struggles persist. There is obvious suffering that exists throughout the world outside of people’s control. On many days the forces of fatalism have triumphed, leaving little reason to be hopeful. 

Mean world syndrome, first coined in the 1970s by Dr. George Gerbner, is a cognitive bias where the world begins appearing and feeling to be more dangerous than it actually is, due to repeated exposure to violence-related content on mass media. Increased feelings of pessimism, fear, and even a hyper-vigilance of perceived threats may develop. This bias impacts people’s beliefs and attitudes about the world. 

Repeated surveys and polls in the United States and around the world reveal that people hold a pessimistic outlook about the world and about the future of the world. But why?

Richard Curtis who wrote and directed the film Love Actually, perhaps tapped into this outlook when he said: 

‘If you make a film about a man kidnapping a woman and chaining her to a radiator for five years-something that has happened probably once in history-it’s called a searingly realistic analysis of society. If I make a film like Love Actually, which is about people falling in love, and there are about a million people falling in love in Britain today, it’s called a sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world.’

In Build the Life You Want, Arthur Brooks provides an example of a group of participants split into three camps with a different set of instructions. There’s the Moral Deeds Group (doing something that will benefit, directly or indirectly, another person); the Moral Thoughts Group (thinking about another person or group in a positive way); and the Treat Yourself Group (doing a positive thing for yourself). After ten days of this experiment each group felt more satisfisfaction.

However, those who actively cared for others felt less anger, less social isolation, and a greater sense of purpose. Being other-centered can feel as good or better than being self-centered.

The lesson: Kindness isn't simply a day, it is a way of living. It is a direction, not a destination. It is a path to a good, meaningful, and purposeful life. Make it part of a school's mission, not simply a statement, to err in the direction of kindness as George Saunders wrote. Add light to the life of others. As Shakespeare wrote,“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.” This is how love does and usually wins.