Wisdom of the Ages

I was sitting at breakfast this morning with my granddaughter,Rose. The New York Times headline “Truck Attack on French Crowd;Scores Die” sat ominously on the counter next to us. I was trying to explain to a brilliant nine year old that a man had driven a truck through a crowd of people in France and killed at least 80, many of them children. Rose’s question was simple, “Didn’t anyone teach him the Golden Rule?” And all I could say was, “probably not”.

Having just retired from a professorship at the University of Southern California, I can assure you that I never encountered mention of the principle: “Do unto others as you would they do unto you.” I know I never heard about it when I was a student at Princeton in the 1960’s. And yet as Karen Armstrong points out, it was the core teaching of all of the world’s religions. But this is not what is taught to students today, as David Brooks points out.

Western society is built on the assumption that people are fundamentally selfish. Machiavelli and Hobbes gave us influential philosophies built on human selfishness. Sigmund Freud gave us a psychology of selfishness. Children, he wrote, “are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.”

Classical economics adopts a model that says people are primarily driven by material self-interest. Political science assumes that people are driven to maximize their power.But this worldview is clearly wrong. In real life, the push of selfishness is matched by the pull of empathy and altruism. This is not Hallmark card sentimentalism but scientific fact: As babies our neural connections are built by love and care. We have evolved to be really good at cooperation and empathy. We are strongly motivated to teach and help others.

My brilliant granddaughter understands what many of my academic colleagues don’t: without some moral grounding of our education we are potentially entering an Age of Anarchy. The economists that dominate academia just see us as self-interest maximizing units of production. One of our Presidential candidates boasts of his ability to maximize his own self interest in the housing crash, when his fellow citizens were forced into bankruptcy. It is so perfect that Trump has picked the Ayn Rand acolyte Peter Thiel to be a key speaker at his convention next week. As Rand wrote, Trump and Thiel believe that, “If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruisim that men have to reject.” An Thiel himself has made it clear that this applies to business as in life. He told the Wall Street Journal, “if you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly.”

The task of our time is to rebuild the idea of compassion embedded in the Golden Rule. Our religous institutions have failed us just like our secular institutions. Too often pastors, imans, rabbis spend their sermons telling us what we should reject: homosexuals, infidels, libertines. They all need to go back to the core of their religion, which was the Golden Rule. But somehow our secular institutions have to teach this as well.

Otherwise we are in for an Age of Anarchy.