Category: Fresno Bee Religion and Ethics Columns

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The Sometimes Difficult Path to Forgiveness

Ethics: The sometimes difficult path to forgiveness

By Andrew Fiala- Special to The Fresno Bee

Monday, Feb. 25, 2013 | 01:26 PM

It is easy to focus on justice, resentment and punishment. We forget that mercy and forgiveness are also important social values.

The conflict between justice and mercy is a central focus for Trudy Conway, an ethics professor from Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland. Conway was in Fresno this week to give a lecture for Fresno State’s Ethics Center on her new book opposing capital punishment, “Where Justice and Mercy Meet.”

Conway’s work points toward a larger consideration of virtues such as hospitality, tolerance and compassion. She is interested in how those values help us develop genuine moral communities. In an earlier essay, Conway explained that compassion rests on “feeling myself into the other.” She writes, “it is only when I can see and feel the other’s pain and recognize it as in some way my own that I can begin to morally respond to the other.”

We often fail to see and feel other people’s suffering. Criminals obviously fail to consider the suffering of those they assault. Retaliation and retribution appear to offer compensation for the suffering of the victim. But Conway warns that the desire for retaliation can lead us to reduce wrongdoers to their worst moments and downplay compassion. She asks, how would you like to be judged and remembered for your worst deed? Mercy and forgiveness look beyond a person’s worst act, toward the dignity and worth of that person’s entire life, with compassion for their suffering, and hope for redemption.

Forgiveness and mercy do help us sustain ordinary relationships in a world where people make mistakes and do bad things. But murder seems different. The finality of murder appears to cut off the possibility of forgiveness by annihilating the victim, who cannot offer forgiveness. And there is something morally problematic about offering forgiveness on behalf of another. Forgiveness is a gift that can only be granted by the one who has been harmed.

But it is possible that those who are most closely related to the victim could offer a kind of forgiveness. One of the co-editors of “Where Justice and Mercy Meet” is Vicki Schieber, the mother of a young woman, Shannon, who was brutally raped and murdered. Schieber has actively opposed the death penalty since Shannon’s murder. She has been working toward the abolition of the death penalty in Maryland, a legislative outcome that may soon be accomplished.

In the concluding chapter of “Where Justice and Mercy Meet,” Schieber celebrates forgiveness, reconciliation and compassion. She describes overcoming the desire for revenge in Christian terms, as a process of un-hardening the heart, grounded in Catholic teaching about the sacredness of all human life.

The secular justice system is, however, not focused on those values. We expect justice to be impartial, equal and fair. Forgiveness and mercy appear to be too subjective and arbitrary for the institutions of justice.

But we forget that justice has an emotional component. Conway points out that concern for justice is linked to righteous indignation. It is appropriate to feel outrage in the face of wrongdoing. But Conway warns that “righteous anger” can devolve into the desire for “retaliatory revenge.”

The move from righteous anger to retaliatory revenge is a familiar one. Consider what happens when rude or disrespectful behavior occurs. Adrenaline surges and blood pressure rises in a variation of the flight or fight response. Righteous indignation is linked to the justifiable urge to fight back in defense.

But righteous anger can lead to resentment and an excessive desire for revenge. And this can blind us, preventing us from seeing others as persons, who make mistakes and deserve compassion. Compassion, forgiveness and mercy point beyond justice and anger toward a calmer, broader perspective that sees individuals as more than their worst deeds.

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True Love Overpowers Cynicism, Marketing

Ethics: True love overpowers cynicism, marketing

By Andrew Fiala

Thursday, Feb. 14, 2013 | 11:10 AM

Valentine’s Day celebrates the defiant, unruly and awe-inspiring power of love. Love is emotional, unstable and fleeting. But it offers hope, inspiration and a taste of eternity.

When we fall in love, we are overcome by desire for the beloved. We crave the other’s presence and feel incomplete without them. We will break rules and resist authority to be with the beloved. That’s the story of Romeo and Juliet: defiant teenage lovers who cannot stand to live apart.

The legend of Saint Valentine is also connected with the rebellious affirmation of love. Valentine supposedly married Christians in defiance of Roman law. This led to his martyrdom. Love arouses courageous resistance to authority and sacrificial deeds.

Philosophers have long noted the power of love. Plato suggested that love stimulates virtue. Love inspires us to become better, so that we are more deserving of the beautiful presence of the beloved. And Plato hinted that love and beauty were eternal goods.

Kant explained that beauty is a symbol of morality. When we love a beautiful object, we celebrate its inherent worth. True love is for the sake of the beloved. The Romantics extolled the experience of beauty and the spiritual power of love. Emerson explained “all mankind loves a lover.” We love to see people in love. The smiles and glances of those who have fallen in love are hints of joy and magic.

Love is enchanting and beauty is bewitching. Advertisers know this. They use love and beauty to sell us products, filling our screens with enticing appearances and images of lovers. Too much of a focus on beautiful appearances is a problem. It can lead us to see persons as objects. Facebook “friends,” pornography, video games and the icons of popular culture are pixels without personality. Such images are disposable and exchangeable. We use them, discard them, and move on to the next.

There is a risk that we will come to see living human persons this way, if we are too focused on beautiful appearances. The risk is that we will move through relationships and interact with people as if they were merely pictures on a screen. Attraction to beautiful images remains skin deep. Love aims deeper, toward the person who abides beneath changing appearances.

Shakespeare indicated this when he suggested that true love lasts beyond the changes of the seasons. In one of his sonnets, he says to his beloved, “thy eternal summer shall not fade.” Love remains devoted to the beauty of the other, the youthful summer day, even as time moves on. Great and beautiful love affairs are hints of eternity. The Shakespearian lover remains enamored of the beloved even as death approaches.

Some may deny that there is such thing as deep and abiding love. Critics will claim that attraction and appetite rule the day, that love is a flowery façade concealing primal desires. The critic will dismiss love with a cynical wink and a salacious snicker.

The cynic is right that love remains an ideal. It is obvious that we are seduced by appetite and appearance. But ethical love corrects the wandering eye and the hungry heart out of devotion to the beloved. If there is no such thing as true and eternal love, the lover claims that there ought to be.

Our culture celebrates the dazzling heat of young, impetuous lovers. But this ignores the fact that young love dies, as Romeo and Juliet did. Would Romeo still love Juliet as her beauty faded and her hair turned grey? Would Juliet love a pudgy, balding Romeo?

Lasting love requires commitment and care for the concrete reality of an actual person over time. Genuine love happens when you love the other person despite their changing appearance, through hardship, illness and despair. It happens when we see the summer day even in the gloom of February.

It is not always easy to see the beauty in the other. Some days it is quite hard to love ourselves, and even harder to love anyone else. But true lovers look for the ideal, defying the changing appearances and the ravages of time. They keep looking for the summer day. Nothing lasts forever. But true love comes close.

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From Wild Board Dung to Steroids, Athletes Cheat

Fiala on ethics: From wild boar dung to steroids, athletes cheat

 By Andrew Fiala

Fresno Bee, Friday, Jan. 25, 2013 | 05:30 PM

It’s been a bad month for cheaters and liars in sports.

Lance Armstrong confessed to doping. Steroid-using baseball superstars were kept out of the Hall of Fame. And we learned that Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o was caught up in an elaborate hoax.

Fraud and mendacity are as old as athletic competition. Homer’s “Iliad” recounts cheating in a chariot race. Ancient charioteers also sought assistance from performance enhancers. Wild boar dung boiled in vinegar was one preferred potion. The emperor Nero even took the stuff, looking for a competitive edge. When Nero “competed” he won every event — in a falsified Olympiad set up to please his own vanity.

I discussed the recent athletic hogwash with Andrew Marden, the weekend sports anchor for KGPE (Channel 47). From Marden’s perspective, one of the biggest problems is the presence of big money in sports. Monetary rewards will tempt vainglorious and greedy athletes to cheat. The money spreads to the team, the agents and the league itself. The more an athlete wins, the more money everyone makes, tempting the organization to look the other way.

Marden also pointed out that we love stories of athletes overcoming adversity. We admire Te’o’s tenacity after his girlfriend’s death. We celebrate Armstrong’s ability to “live strong” after cancer. The narrative crumbles when we discovered that Te’o’s girlfriend never existed and Armstrong’s athletic performance was drug-assisted.

These stories become classically tragic when the conceited cheaters get their comeuppance. We like that part of the story, too: It satisfies our desire for vindication.

There’s a kind of relief that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemons weren’t voted into the Hall of Fame. And many are hoping that Armstrong’s confession to Oprah will lead to further repercussions.

Marden pointed out that public shame and moralistic requital is a weak punishment for a millionaire. Indeed, shameful misdeeds don’t seem to diminish an athlete’s earning potential. Consider Melky Cabrera, the baseball star who was given a 50-game suspension last summer for doping. Cabrera missed the Giants’ World Series victory. But he signed a $16 million contract with the Toronto Blue Jays. Apparently it’s not true that cheaters never prosper.

A further problem is that cheaters and liars seem to actually enjoy cheating and lying. The so-called “cheater’s high” is a sense of elation that comes from successfully getting away with pulling a fast one.

Effective cheats often don’t feel guilty. Instead they get a charge from taking advantage and not getting caught. The same sort of thrill might explain lying, stealing, marital infidelity or even negotiating a business deal. We feel powerful and alive when we outfox our opponents and trick others into taking our hogwash seriously.

The victorious cheater’s exhilaration might explain why cheaters are not very good at assessing their actual abilities and performance. A 2010 study by Zoe Chance, from the Harvard Business School, indicates that students who cheat on tests tend to lie to themselves about their own skills and intelligence. Cheaters overestimate their own abilities and intelligence. Cheaters predict that they will continue to perform well in the future, not acknowledging that their past achievement was a result of cheating.

That kind of confident self-deception can be an asset in some circumstances. Successful competitors need to be self-assured and poised — they can’t second-guess themselves or beat themselves up over failure. But that kind of resolute composure can easily become arrogance.

Armstrong admitted this in his interview with Oprah. He said, “My ruthless desire to win at all costs served me well on the bike but the level it went to, for whatever reason, is a flaw. That desire, that attitude, that arrogance.”

The cheater’s cool conceit combines with our gullible desire to believe a great story. This makes it easy for cheats to succeed — for a while. But the cheater’s fatal flaw is his own arrogant belief that he can keep getting away with it.

The truth eventually comes out, especially in stories that are too good to be true.

In the meantime we have to remain vigilant. Athletes are easily tempted to drink the wild boar dung.

And we gullible fans are often inclined to swallow their hogwash.

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Can mindfulness influence our moral character?

Can mindfulness influence our moral character?

Andrew Fiala

Fresno Bee, Originally published 2013-01-12

Take a breath and slowly exhale. Unclench your jaw. Clear your mind. Be present now. Feel better?

A growing body of evidence suggests that there are mental, physical and emotional benefits to yoga and meditation. Some recent studies suggest that mindfulness can lead us to be more ethical.

A recent paper by Marc Lampe, a professor at the University of San Diego, argues thatmindfulness helps improve cognitive awareness and emotional regulation. This can contribute to ethical decision making. A study by Nicole Ruedy and Maurice Schweitzer, at the University of Pennsylvania, links mindfulness to “moral attentiveness.” They claim that mindfulnesshelps us avoid making excuses for immoral behavior.

This is not too surprising. Common sense tells us that we think more clearly when we calm our emotions by taking a few deep breaths. But perhaps there is more to mindfulness than deep breathing and attentive awareness.

The practice of mindfulness comes from non-Western religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. When Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that mindfulness helps us touch the peace that is here now in the present moment, it is easy to forget that there is a complicated metaphysical and psychological theory underlying this idea.

Despite these exotic roots, Americans have embraced mindfulness. A congressman from Ohio, Tim Ryan, published a book last year, “A Mindful Nation,” which suggests thatmindfulness can help us work better, reduce health-care costs and improve the performance of the military. Ryan even secured a million-dollar federal earmark for mindfulness training in schools in Youngstown, Ohio, with the goal of using mindfulness to improve student performance.

I wonder, however, whether mindfulness should be employed as a tool for achieving the American Dream. There is something odd about using yoga to enhance military performance or meditating in order to improve profit margins. The core of mindful meditation seems to point in another more peaceful and less materialistic direction.

Critics of mindfulness worry that Eastern meditation practices cannot be easily grafted onto Western roots. Consider the controversy that erupted recently in Encinitas, a yoga-friendly beach town north of San Diego. When the Encinitas schools introduced yoga as part of the school day, Christian parents threatened to sue the school district. They view yoga as a pagan practice and demanded that their children be exempted from the program.

Some Christians have embraced alternative contemplative practices without seeing a contradiction with their own spiritual commitments. But other Christians remain opposed. In 2011, an Italian priest, Gabriele Amorth, denounced yoga as Satanic. The president of the Southern Baptist Seminary, Albert Mohler, described Eastern meditation as an “empty promise,” since it focuses on emptying the mind instead of connecting with God. Christian pastor Mark Driscoll argues that Eastern spirituality blurs the distinction between good and evil, “promoting cultural pluralism and the denial of truth.”

The claim that meditation results in relativism and the denial of truth is a significant accusation. Traditional Western approaches to ethics and religion focus on rule-following behavior and orthodoxy of belief. This requires clear judgment and an effort to distinguish between right and wrong. But mindfulness in Eastern traditions appears to have a different focus, as nonjudgmental awareness.

Jon Kabbat-Zinn — an influential proponent of meditation — connects mindfulness with nonjudging acceptance and letting go. The idea is to let experience occur without attempting to categorize, manage and direct it. A kind of serenity and peacefulness develops when letting things be, without judgment or control.

Proponents of mindfulness connect this with values such as nonviolence and compassion. But the serene equanimity of mindfulness can seem to its critics like relativism and indifference to God and the good.

There are obvious benefits to taking a mindful breath. We do make better judgments when we are able to step aside from emotional tumult and the reactive pressures of the world. But critics will argue that this is not enough — that the empty mind must be filled with principles, truths and moral judgments. There is a fundamental difference of opinion here about what counts in terms of ethical discipline and spiritual practice.

There may be no way to resolve this dispute. But it might help us to think better about these deep questions, if we took a few mindful breaths.

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Recent Violence Raises Questions About Men

Recent violence raises questions about men

Andrew Fiala

Fresno Bee, 2012-12-29

The Newtown gunman killed his own mother before opening fire at Sandy Hook elementary school. Another gunman, near Rochester, N.Y., killed firefighters who responded to a fire he had set. He had previously killed his grandmother and most likely began his rampage by killing his sister. In both cases the gunmen killed themselves.

These stories have an obvious gender component. Mass murderers are almost always men. According to Mother Jones magazine, of the 62 mass murders committed since 1982, only one was done by a woman. The rest of the shooters were men.

It might be that mental illness has a gender component. But why do mentally ill men shoot their mothers and random strangers, while mentally ill women do not? Mental illness manifests itself in culturally specific and gender specific ways. Killing, brutality, and suicide are associated with masculinity.

Men are, in general, about 10 times more likely to commit murder than women. Suicide also has a gender component, with a ratio of four male suicides for every female suicide. We might also note that domestic violence is gendered, with incest, partner rape, battery, and honor killing usually perpetrated by men.

Some might blame biology. The “demonic male” thesis popularized by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson holds that male violence is a common trait among male dominant apes such as humans and chimpanzees. According to this idea, male dominance is a useful tool for social organization, even though it results in occasional atrocity.

But biology and evolution only explain so much. Culture also matters. Brutality, toughness, and fearlessness are deeply woven into cultural images of masculinity. We celebrate mean and ruthless men — on the sports field, in films, and in our military mythology.

The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre appeared to blame cultural images of violence in his remarks earlier this month. He deflected criticism of guns and called for armed guards in schools. He also blamed violent video games. Most interesting was his description of violent video games as pornography. He said, “Isn’t fantasizing about killing people to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?”

The porn connection points toward the gender issue. American men grow up in a culture in which sex and violence have become vicarious events. It is easy to watch people have sex and to watch people kill. What kind of affect does this have on our relationships and our ideas about morality?

The larger problem is one of dehumanization. Pornography turns women into two-dimensional images to be observed and consumed. And violent games and movies turn killing into a thrilling spectator sport. The consumer is able to view other people as objects to be used, without consideration for the experience of the other person.

This problem of dehumanization may explain the connection between mass murder and suicide. The philosopher Immanuel Kant noted two hundred years ago that lack of respect for others is connected with lack of respect for self. Suicide and murder are two sides of the same inhuman coin. Like suicide terrorists (who are also almost always male), mass murderers have embraced death. The shooter wants to die. But he wants to take innocent people with him as he kills himself. This points toward a kind of rage against life, a hatred of everything.

Games and films are not to blame for deep moral nihilism. Most game players do not end up murdering strangers. And most porn-consumers do not become rapists. The causal story is complex. Nonetheless, the constant dehumanizing imagery of popular culture can have an insidious affect on the disaffected and mentally ill. Imagining murder in a game makes it that much easier to commit it, when life falls apart around you.

Rage and despair combine with images of masculinity and easy access to deadly weapons to create a deadly mix. Maybe that’s the price we pay for liberty: for the freedom to own guns, consume porn and enjoy violent entertainment. Gun control would make suicide and mass killing more difficult. Maybe censorship would help. But the problem is larger than the guns and the games. The deep question is why some men hate life enough to kill mothers, grandmothers, children, and themselves; and why women rarely do.