'Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels'.......

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing". 

1 Corinthians 13

I was reminded of this passage today while in conversation with a good friend. I thought of it because we are both scientists and we both work in an academic research setting. We were talking about some of the sociopathic behavior we have been witness to or recipients of on different occasions in our workplace, and it struck me that a high degree of intelligence is absolutely no guarantee of good behavior (in the moral sense). Many young people are often told that education is the key to a better life, and while that may be true in the materialistic sense, it does not have to be true in a spiritual sense. A long education, an advanced degree, and a corresponding advanced career do not necessarily make a person a good person; they only make a person qualified for a specific job or career. And that is fine, but I have seen so much morally questionable behavior in my years in the workplace that I have learned that the quest for knowledge is an admirable thing, but not at the expense of your spiritual life or your soul. And that is what the above passage is trying to say to us—that we can have all the knowledge in the world but if we have not learned to love, all that knowledge is useless. It cannot help us.

I continue to be surprised by the poor behavior I see in people whom, as my mother would have said, are intelligent enough to know better. That is the responsibility that knowledge should impart—to use that knowledge carefully and responsibly, to treat others with respect—‘to do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. Well-educated people should know how to behave—should know that cheating, stealing, lying and misusing others are wrong and that it is best to avoid them. They should be actively leading the way toward a good spiritual life. The competitive world of academic science opens the doors to a lot of strange and morally ambiguous/morally wrong behavior. So then I ask, what is the point of all this knowledge if it is not to make the world a better place? If all this knowledge does not make us better people, then perhaps we would be better off without it? Perhaps it would be better to emphasize love and compassion in school instead. To paraphrase the above passage—‘what good does a high-impact factor publication do if I have not love? And though I have the talent for making money and gaining power and prestige and high rank, but have not love, I am nothing’. 

Changing the world

It sometimes seems to me as though the apocalypse is coming, in one form or another, and perhaps it is best not to know how it will occur—earthquake, tsunami, meteor hitting the earth, droughts, fires, floods—there could be many different scenarios. It didn’t help to hear today that the nuclear crisis in Fukushima Japan has been upgraded to Chernobyl status. I wonder how much more Japan can take. How much is too much before a country collapses? I look at what we are doing to our planet in addition to the natural disasters that occur, courtesy of Mother Nature, and we don’t need to add our man-made disasters to the natural ones. I need only think of the chlorine poisoning of the Akerselva River to remind me that carelessness abounds and that many disasters are man-made, and that animal life suffers at our hands. The world has witnessed recent oil spills and the tragic loss of animal and fish life. We really need to start re-thinking our priorities. I think there is so much that is topsy-turvy in the world, average ordinary people know it, and they know or sense that some monumental change is coming, because this unlimited greed and consumption and utter indifference to anything other than a huge paycheck cannot continue. God knows what that will be--perhaps a huge worldwide revolution against greed and inhumanity and lack of concern for the planet, or a return to a simpler way of life, more agrarian, less industrialized, less money-oriented, and less competitive. I’d be all for it.

It’s hard not to feel drained by the way we are living our lives now, and very tiring to hear that nothing can change because this is ‘just the way the world is’—full of greed, competition, unscrupulousness, lack of empathy (for people and for animals), carelessness, indifference, and hatred. I know there are good average ordinary people in the world, because I know a lot of them and I am one myself. But the people in power are the ones who worry me. The Wall Street moguls are the ones who worry me. And why I ask do we need Wall Street? Really, why do we? Why can’t we start by dismantling Wall Street? I applaud Michael Moore in his recent film Capitalism: A Love Story, for trying to make a citizen’s arrest of Wall Street denizens at the end of the film. Of course you laugh or smile when you see him do that, but you know too that he is serious, even though he is making a point. There is no real work done on Wall Street from the standpoint of actually producing viable products. And when did it become cool to buy warrants and derivatives in the hope that a company will do poorly so that you can earn money on the possibility of its failure? I just don’t get the world these days. Literally everything has to do with money, all business and political decisions seem to be guided solely by the prospect of making money. It’s boring. It’s become a non-creative world that is slowly sinking into a quagmire. And perhaps the best thing is to let it sink so that it can be replaced by a better world—one in which people in power care about the planet and the lands they live in, one in which money isn’t the be-all and the end-all of everything .

On civility and respect

I was talking to one of my friends the other day, and our conversation veered into the area of civility and respect for others. She was bemoaning the lack of respect that she deals with on an often daily basis in her job as grammar school teacher. The fact of the matter is that children don’t respect teachers nor are they instructed at home to do so. Her feeling is often that some parents have ‘abandoned ship’ by not involving themselves in their children’s education. I listen to her frustration and understand that it must be very difficult to teach when you do not have the attention and respect of your class. This is not to say that all her pupils are like this, but those who are disrespectful make it difficult for the rest of the class, as always. I remember this from my own grammar school days, seething because one or two boys disrupted the class and the teacher ended up punishing the entire class for the sins of a few. But generally, the disrespect and the lack of manners that we are witnessing at present are slowly destroying the fabric of society. We need respect and civility in order to deal with each other on a daily basis. When these disappear, I think I will move to the hills, far away from everyone, and live as a hermit.

Oslo is now trying to do something about the lack of manners that abound on public transportation. There have been several newspaper articles recently describing how younger people are not offering their seats on buses or trams to older people or to pregnant women for example during rush hour, and discussions and debates abound on television about how to deal with the problem. In my book, it’s a simple answer. Just do it. Just open your mouth and offer your seat to an older person or an obviously pregnant woman. For every person who says no thanks, there are two who will say thank you and take you up on your offer. It costs nothing to try offering your seat. It is better than never offering it at all. Have we become such a passive society that we ignore what is going on around us? Are we so tuned out listening to our music or reading our newspapers that we cannot see what is going on around us? Have we become thoughtless people? There are other problems as well. There is no such thing as ‘cueing up’ in Norway, at least not from what I can see in Oslo. Lines that form are suddenly ‘ignored’ by a few people who decide that they need to be first. It is infuriating to witness this, because none of the Norwegians get angry either when this happens (except me, the American and the New Yorker). I just think back to the time when there was a public transportation strike in New York City during the early 1980s; lines stretched around the block to take the private buses that transported folk to and from the different boroughs, and you could easily wait in line for an hour to board a bus. If you had tried to cut in line before someone else, you would have had your head handed to you. New Yorkers believe in lines and they will (loudly) defend their place in line and prevent another from unfairly cutting in line before them. That’s just how it is and I for one think it’s correct to comment someone else’s rude behavior if they try to cut in line. It may lead to arguments, but hey, that’s better than standing by passively letting the rudeness and disrespect occur.

A new and particularly disrespectful trend among some people (especially the younger people but also some middle-aged as well) is to double or triple book an evening—in other words, to say yes to two or three invitations and then to choose the best or what they consider to be the coolest event to attend. I am just surmising that this is the case because I have no other explanation for the behavior. I have now witnessed (and experienced personally) this several times.  On one occasion, I invited several people to a small dinner party, and all of them said they could come. The day before the dinner, I sent out a little reminder email and wished everyone welcome. Immediately afterward, I received an email from one person telling me she could not make it because of last minute work deadlines. Had I not emailed her, she would not have showed up and would not have informed me at all. I would have called her wondering where she was and she would have waited until then to tell me. I cannot rule out that she had made other plans that were more important to her. On the evening in question, another person almost didn’t come because her thirty year old son was returning home from traveling and she ‘suddenly’ had to pick him up at the airport. As it was, she showed up late but at least she showed up. But those of us who were present at the dinner wondered why he couldn’t just have taken a taxi home when he knew his mother had made other plans. But it was her fault anyway for not standing up for herself and saying that she had other plans. And so it goes. On a recent job outing (dinner out at a restaurant), ten people had agreed to meet for dinner and all of them expressed enthusiasm about getting together, even up until three days before we were all to meet. Exactly three days before the dinner, four people canceled: two had made other plans and were completely open about this (!); one said it would probably be difficult for her to make it without giving any specific reason; and one was genuinely sick. A table had been booked for ten people, and six people showed up. I can only wonder how conferences and seminars can plan anything, especially if food is ordered for participants. You could order food for two hundred people who say they will attend a seminar, and one hundred people show up. As I recall now, that has also happened in recent years, and the participants ended up taking the leftover food home. But the arrangers still had to pay for it. It’s completely rude and disrespectful to behave this way, but it has become much more common now than before. I never remember people behaving this way before. I have another example from last autumn—also work-related. A tour of Oslo’s haunted old buildings had been planned and ten people said they would join. A guide was booked (that ten people would have paid for). Only three people showed up. The tour was fun and very interesting, but even the guide seemed a bit taken aback and wondered where the other seven people were. This is just plain wrong--bad behavior, rude behavior. The seven people who did not show up knew that they were leaving the eventual cost over to three people. Disrespectful. As it was, the bill was paid by our institute and did not come out of our pockets, simply because one of the bosses also thought as I did, that this behavior was irresponsible. I am commenting on this type of behavior because it seems as though this is where society is heading. We ‘commit’, but only half-heartedly. We don’t show up and we don’t feel bad (none of the ‘cancellers’ in question felt badly about their behavior). We cannot count on the word of another. And that is something to worry about. If this type of behavior had just happened once, I would be inclined to let it go as a one-time thing. But unfortunately it is becoming all too prevalent. People need to speak up, to say ‘this is rude’, ‘I don’t like this behavior’ and so forth. Having manners and respect for others is part of what it means to be a responsible adult, and children need to be taught these as well. But they cannot learn the correct way to behave from adults when the adults themselves don’t know how to behave.