An elementary schoolteacher's reflection on moral leadership

Among a number of responses to Dana Meadows column on moral leardership, the following, from an elementary school teacher, was one I found particularly compelling.

Thank you for sharing this with me.  Given the moral sleaze that seems to be so rampant in this current financial disaster Dana's thoughts are certainly as relevant now as they were when she wrote them.  I cannot recall a time in my life when examples of greed, and disregard for others, among people who were entrusted with other people's money, retirements, and in some cases the quality of life for so many, and they just blew it off for their own excessive personal greed.  I know that there are ethics classes in business schools, I wonder if they are required?  If not, then probably the only people who take them are the people who really don't need to, the people, as Dana says that knew "right from wrong all along."

As a teacher of young children, teaching ethics, is paramount, and woven into the tapestry of my everyday lessons, encounters, and mediations.  

Ending Hunger: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Many years ago, almost in another lifetime, I collaborated on a book entitled Ending Hunger an Idea Whose Time has Come.  Dana Meadows, about whose death anniversary I wrote earlier today, conceived the book.  At the time more than one million people had committed themselves to ending hunger by ‘enrolling’ in The Hunger Project.  Dana was a Hunger Project Board member and she enrolled me.  The book’s idea was that these committed people needed information, from experts, marshaled usefully, to translate their commitment into action. The story of Ending Hunger’s writing was a turbulent one, but of less interest than the book itself.  Work on the book consumed a major part of my life for several years but after it saw the light of day, I rarely looked at it.

Two days ago I did.  The occasion was preparation for a class in ‘spirituality and global politics’ in which I was guest lecturing.  I experienced the book as a beautiful, path breaking work that has stood the test of time.  It remains as a testimonial, albeit unacknowledged, to Dana Meadows vision and intellect.  It was intended to communicate a simple, powerful message that was true and needed when the book was written and is true and needed today. The message was this:

Hunger exists

It doesn’t need to. 

The people who are working hardest to end hunger are hungry people themselves.

Clearly we know enough to end hunger

There is little consensus about what to do - knowledge is important, but intention and will are more important.  They are  prerequisite  using knowledge in a way that makes a difference.

There is also something to be learned from book’s methodology - to have a dialogue you must understand the opposing point of view and be able to articulate it as well as your own

And the the bushfires raged

This particularly moving passage was sent to me by a Sri Lankan friend who is now visiting in Australia.

Australia – “AND THE BUSHFIRES RAGED…

  

The bushfires continue to burn in Melbourne’s suburbs, though the worst is almost over.

 

We are left with a blackened, desolate landscape, with overwhelming grief for those who died and with the shattered lives and guilt of those who survived.

 

Why do such dreadful disasters happen?  We search for answers, but there are none.

 

As those who have suffered slowly come to terms with their pain and loss, will they, and we, find it in ourselves to forgive…?

 

Why forgive?

 

It is the hardest, but most important act of all:  As a victim – to forgive yourself for living, while your loved ones have died, your home has burned, your life’s possessions are gone.  As a volunteer, a doctor, a fire fighter – for being unable to comfort another, save a life, put out a fire.  As a person – for being unable to do more to help.

 

Can we forgive a God who wreaks such havoc on innocent people for no apparent reason?  Or the looters and opportunists who are preying on the victims?  Or the firebug who knowingly lit those fires? 

 

Are we capable of such forgiveness?

 

The tongues of orange flame leap out at us, day after day – from our TV screens, newspapers, computers – burning into our psyche, our memory. It engulfs me. I cannot watch anymore.  An ambulance screams through the city streets, on its mission of mercy.  Its piercing call cannot be ignored. The pall of grey smoke hangs heavy over the city, making it hard to breathe. And I choke, remembering.  It permeates the buildings, reminding us.  Reminding us it isn’t over yet.   

 

Perhaps it will never be, for those who’ve seen and suffered.

 

From the ruins of the fires, the grass and trees will grow tall again, the flowers will bloom. Just as they did after the deadly devastation of Hiroshima.  Or following the terrible tsunami.  Just as the flowers bloom in the fields of war.  

 

It is the first sign of hope and healing – it tells us that the time to rebuild has come.

 

Remembering Dana Meadows on the 8th Aniversary of Her Death

Buddhists remember death aniversaries as a way of acknowledging and celebrating people that were important in their lives.  For me, and many others, Dana (Donella) Meadows was one of those.  For many years, she shared herself in a weekly column entitled 'The Global Citizen'.  Here is a column that particularly captures who she was - and is.

The Donella Meadows Archive

Voice of a Global Citizen

We Don't Need Leadership to Know Right from Wrong

 

"Assaulted by sleaze, scandals, and hypocrisy, America searches for its moral bearings," the cover of the May 25 Time magazine says. The essay inside describes how the Reagan administration has failed in moral leadership -- or, more precisely, how it has succeeded in promoting "mindless materialism" and a "values vacuum".

Given the national confusion on ethical issues from Baby M to the defense of the Persian Gulf, we could use some moral leadership. But if I'm a typical example, I'm afraid we are likely to look for it in the wrong place.

My all-American public-school education was not exactly heavy on ethical analysis. In fact, since I took mostly science courses, my moral confidence was systematically eroded. Every day I absorbed strong messages -- values have no place in the laboratory; observe what is happening outside you, not inside you; your feelings have no validity.

My scientific training taught me to determine rightness and wrongness from outside, from measurable criteria such as economic profitability, not from the promptings of an invisible, unquantifiable conscience. And my elders provided me with hundreds of examples of how to rationalize glibly just about any act I might want to commit.

Then I was asked by my university to teach a course on ethics. I didn't know how to begin. How could I lead students through the thickets of moral controversy about population growth, nuclear power, acid rain? And yet what could be more important than to provide them with some ethical grounding?

To prepare for the course I sat in on philosophy and religion classes. I read books on ethics. I talked to pastors, priests, and gurus from many religions. I looked outside myself for moral leadership.

What I discovered was that I had known right from wrong all along.

Religions and ethical theories all have lists of moral rules. The rules generally boil down to the ones we learned at our mothers' knees. Don't hurt people, don't steal, don't lie. Help each other out.

The rules are not the primary authority, say the ethicists. They derive from something we all have within us, a clear sense of rightness, a sense that is given many names. We can get in touch with it whenever we want to. Prayer and meditation are ways -- not the only ways -- of getting in touch, of listening for moral guidance.

What that guidance says is consistent and simple. You are precious and special. So is everyone else, absolutely everyone. Act accordingly.

Don't do to someone else what you wouldn't want done to you. Don't do what would cause society to fall apart if everyone did it. Try to do what you would want done if you were someone else -- a homeless person in New York, a child in Ethiopia, a Nicaraguan peasant, a Polish dockworker.

You don't want your spouse to commit adultery, so don't do it yourself. You don't want to raise a family on a minimum wage, so pay your workers decent incomes. You don't want to live near a hazardous waste dump, so don't create one. If everyone cheats on income tax or insider-trading laws, the government and the stock market wouldn't function. So don't cheat.

It's really not hard to see what's right. What's hard is to admit how much of what we do is wrong.

Moral confusion is greatest not at the individual level, but at the level of nations. We forget that nations involve people too, people who are all as unique and precious as we are. The rules still apply. We don't want Libyan jets sweeping down in the night to bomb Washington -- therefore it was wrong to bomb Tripoli. We don't want Nicaragua to finance hoodlums to shoot our people and destabilize our government -- so it's wrong for us to do that. Creating weapons that can destroy not only enemy nations but also our own is so irrational that it defies ethical theory. To think ethically you have to be at least sane enough to recognize an evil when it threatens YOU.

The usual excuse for state-sponsored immorality is that it opposes the evil of others. When the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, when white Afrikaners oppress blacks, when Qaddafi harbors terrorists, when Chile tortures political dissenters, they are acting immorally. Don't we have an obligation to do something about it?

That's the hardest part of moral theory for me -- what to do about the evil of others. I have found Gandhi to be a wise guide here. Do oppose evil, he says, with all your might. Use every form of resistance and non-cooperation. But don't use violence, which sucks you down into evil yourself. Even a person doing wrong is a person, whose soul you must respect, though you do not respect his actions.

The base assumptions of our foreign policy -- assumptions not invented by the Reagan administration but greatly strengthened by it -- are clearly immoral. Americans are more worthy than other human beings. Our nation ought to have its way at the expense of other nations. The existence of evil elsewhere justifies committing evil ourselves. Not one of those statements is morally defensible.

New moral leadership does not mean someone to tell us what to do. It means someone to help us discover that we already know what to do. Someone who can recognize the smokescreens we all throw into ethical discussions to make us feel good about what we know we should feel bad about. Someone to keep reminding us that we are special and precious -- all of us, every one of us.

 

Copyright Sustainability Institute
This article from The Donella Meadows Archive is available for use in research, teaching, and private study. For other uses, please contact Diana Wright, Sustainability Institute, 3 Linden Road, Hartland, VT 05048, (802) 436-1277 

CTE's fall 2008 semester at AU - lessons learned

Those of us who manage AU’s Center for Teaching Excellence completed our semiannual program review and assessment process this week.  It comprises two meetings.  In the first, we ‘complete the past,’ which, in January, means reviewing our work during the fall semester.  In the second, a 2/3 day ‘retreat’ held in my faculty residence apartment, we review our goals for the upcoming semester.  In the ‘complete the past’ session, each manager reports on ‘what worked’ and ‘what didn’t work.’  Then he or she shares ‘lessons learned’ from those experiences. This latter sharing is the most valuable part of the process. Here is an excerpt from the lessons we learned, during the fall semester.  

• Even when responsibility for a project is shared,  if the outcome is important to us  we should act as if we were ‘responsible for the whole,’ to ensure the project’s success.  Rationalizing failure because ‘someone else didn’t do their job’ is not acceptable.
  
• When working with outside groups, we need to be clear about the division of roles and responsibilities and the capabilities of each participating group before the project begins.
  
• The timing events featuring  outside guest speakers is important. An experiment with bringing a guest speaker in during the early fall revealed that faculty are less likely to attend such events at that time than they are during the January Ann Ferren Teaching Conference. We must work to find other such viable times for faculty events so that our use of outside speakers can be cost-effective.
  
• Sometimes you have to be “mean” (firm, authoritative) to make people pay attention. Challenges posed by a difficult employee motivated a change in management style by the employee’s supervisor, with positive results..
  
• We need to more fully involve graduate fellows in publicizing CTE services by making videos and creating our innovative outreach activities.
  
• When making lists of goals and priorities, it is important to include “good stewardship” – the things we’re always working on. This is not only  give ourselves credit for the things we do, day-to-day,  but also to keep ourselves accountable and remember to pay attention to those ongoing responsibilities.  
  
• When participating in collaborative projects with other units including  university-wide projects like like the new web roll-out, it is important to speak up when things are not going well.  Doing this without hurting a colleague’s feelings is always a challenge and, often, a motivation to simply keep quiet.  When speaking up,  it is important to be positive and focus on the project goals, not to personalize or be confrontational.
  
• Projects work best when the people responsible for them are enthusiastic about them. When people are enthusiastic about something they should be empowered to work on it; if someone isn’t, we should acknowledge this as a management challenge.  They must either be motivated, assigned to other tasks, or, in the worst case, fired.  People must be proactive and enthusiastic to be effective.
  
• Building effective collaboration between units at AU takes great good will on both sides plus very significant investment of time over a long period.  However strong collaborative relationships are time savers in the long run.  An example of collaboration that works really well is that between CTE and the Office of Information Technology (OIT).  Its success illustrates the importance of a proactive commitment to working together on both sides. This approach may also work for other on-campus units,  however we need to be realistic about what is involved and the time it will take.  We must also remember that ‘it takes two to tango.’
  

Many of these lessons may sound like platitudes that one can find in  any basic management or organizational behavior text.  But it is important to remember that platitudes are platitudes because they are true.