Here’s a nice problem.
Supposed you were married, or engaged – it doesn’t matter – and you had a ring. And suppose that one of those cognitive psychologist types invites you into a room for an experiment. There, in the room, is a jeweller, and the jeweller looks at the ring and says, ‘yup, I can make a copy of this ring so perfect that you wouldn’t be able to tell the two apart.’
Then the psychologist leans forwards and says, ‘tell you what, I’ll give you a $1,000 to leave your ring here, so our jeweller can make a copy, and next week you come back and you get to pick which of the two rings you want to take home.’
It turns out that none of the people in the experiment took the money. Actually, that’s not quite true. One person took the money. They were getting divorced.
The cognitive psychologist behind the experiment was a Professor by the name of Scott Atran. And the thing Atranwas interested in, from a cognitive psychologist perspective,was the sacred.
Something is sacred when we value it above its value as a purely material good. So, for example, a ring we value more highly than the value of its bits of gold and diamond is sacred. If it’s really sacred, we can’t be offered money to get over it.
I caught an interview with Atran on a BBC radio programme[1] and I’ve been thinking about how we value the sacred and how we can get along when the things that I might value as sacred are not the same as the things you might value as sacred.
Another piece of research from Professor Atran. Atran went to Iran and met people for whom Iran’s nuclear weapon programme was sacred. That meant they didn’t care for any kind of economic incentive to give up on a nuclear weapon programme. They didn’t care that pursuing a nuclear weapon programme would result in all kinds of economic sanctions.[2] In fact for these people, these Iranians for whom Iran getting a nuclear weapon was a sacred value, it turns out that the more you try and bribe or blackmail them with material incentives or sanctions, the less likely they are to do the thing you might want them to do – that is give up on developing a nuclear weapon programme. If you are interested in Iran NOT getting a nuclear weapon, this ought to be important research for you.
In fact, Atran seems to enjoy getting stuck into some of the most important and most difficult challenges of our time. He went to Israel and met with senior Israeli politicians who have been very clear that don’t want to see the creation of a Palestinian State, and then went to Palestine and Syria and met with leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, terrorist organisations committed to the destruction of Israel, and asked them what material goods would help them give up on their positions on Israel and Palestine … well you can probably guess how that one turned out. According to Atran, the more you offer to pay a leader of Hamas or Islamic Jihad to give up on their desire to send suicide bombers into Israel, the more convinced they become that suicide bombers are indeed a justifiable thing to do. Atran found similar firmness at play among the Israelis – not that that there are any Israeli politicians who advocate suicide bombs, but that you can’t offer material inducement to an Israeli politician and induce them to give up on having Jerusalem as the unified capital of Israel or the like. That won’t be a surprise to anyone who has spent any time following Israeli politics. But, and this is where the good news starts, there is another way forward.
It turns out that if someone is offered a meaningful symbolic gesture, which seeks to show an understanding of the other side, their attitude toward even their own sacred values can melt, a little. If you seek to express an empathy with another person over something that they deem sacred, they do become less antagonistic. And that goes for the political leaders of Israel and even, according to Atran, the leaders of Islamic Jihad and Hamas.
I don’t mean to sound overly fluffy about this. It’s going to take a lot more than a one-off gesture of understanding to solve a multi-generational conflict that has claimed too, too many lives. But if we care about some of the most complex, important and deadly challenges facing us we need to think a lot more carefully about sacred values, and less about material values.
I’ve been reading the most remarkable book – Ronen Bergman’s Rise and Kill First, The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations. It’s some book. I mean, it makes James Bond and John le Carre look like In the Night Garden. Throughout the 70 years the book covers, the basic idea that drives the decisions made by Mossad and the rest of the Israeli Secret Service is that anyone who wishes Israel ill should know that Mossad can get them, and will get them. The basic idea is that anyone who wishes Israel ill should be too scared to do anything about it for the material reason that they will end up getting killed. And Israel has been pretty good at implementing that basic idea. But it’s not at all clear that this material balancing act is how prospective terrorists approach these decisions.
At the climax of this extraordinary book, Bergman tells the story of the end of the career of Israel’s greatest spy-master- the King of Shadows – Meir Dagan himself. Dagan spent 30 years in the Mossad, the last ten as its director and, having read the book, I now know the sorts of things that Dagan did and arranged to have done. Dagan was not fluffy. No-one would ever make the mistake of thinking Dagan was fluffy. But at the end of his life, Dagan changed what he thought Israel should do about those people who wished Israel ill. He came to believe that the basic idea of material threat hadn’t made a difference in 70 years, and wasn’t going to make a difference into the future. At a mass rally before the March 2015 Israeli elections, he challenged the political leadership of Israel to, and I’ll use the language of this sermon, not Dagan’s speech, to treat the challenge of the Palestinians and the Iranians and the rest of them as a problem of sacred values, not material values, and, Dagan argued at the end of his life, sacred values need a very different kind of leadership from that which characterised Dagan’s Mossad.
Enough politics, let me talk more about religion. Because while not all sacred values are religious values – religion can never has violence as a value – all religious values are sacred. To be religious means to value that which cannot be measured, to believe in that which cannot be witnessed. And contrary to the professional God-bashers who think that religion is the root of all evil in the world, my take on this issue is that religion is the best place to go to understand how our sacred values are laid down and how they are shaped and changed. It’s not about the claim that my religion is better or worse than anyone else’s religion, it’s that being a religious leader involves the continual engagement with sacred values.
I’m not an expert on any religion other than my own, let me take just one example from my own faith.
In the time of the Mishnah – that’s around a 1,000 years later there is a story – two people come before the judge each holding on to one corner of a piece of cloth. One person says, ‘I found it and it’s all mine, and the other person says, I found it and it’s all mine.’ And the judge comes up with this solution to the challenge – you get each person to say that not less than half of the cloth is theirs, then you cut up the cloth and each get half.[3]
What interests me is the insistence that both parties have to say that not less than half the cloth is theirs, when just a few moments previously, they had been claiming that all the cloth was theirs. It’s not that the claimants are being told to say something they don’t believe – if they believe that the cloth is all theirs then it’s true that not less than half of it is theirs. They are being softened in their claim, they are being offered a way to be content with less than they claimed. Their implacability is being softened. They are being drawn away from a sacred class and once the decision is merely a material clash – it can be solved.
I could have taken thousands of examples. Rabbinic Judaism is entirely pre-occupied with the nature of competing disputes and claims. The entire Talmud is a collection of tens of thousands of arguments carefully stacked up and considered and recognised. It’s the recognition that is the really remarkable thing. It rarely happens that a Talmudic argument ends with one person being told they are wrong and another being told they are right. Rather the Talmud, on page after page, after page, recognises competing values and softens implacable oppositions until a way to go forward peaceably can be found. Religious debate – at least in Judaism - becomes a way of allowing different people to hold onto different opinions, different sacred values, without feeling the need to fight about it.
Now I know there are bigots who use religion to prop up their bigotry, but I refuse to believe that what I know to be true about Judaism isn’t equally true about other religions. After all we all believe in a God, or gods who are more important than all our claims. That should place a person in a position of humility, not arrogance. Indeed that has been the case with the extraordinary contributions of religious leaders towards such peace-positive developments that have occurred in countries a diverse as South Africa and Ireland.
So here’s the message, whether you find yourself facing a dispute that is large or small, personal or international; watch out for the difference between a sacred value and a material one. We can’t solve clashes of sacred values with material solutions – it will only make things worse. Rather we need to look for ways to recognise the sacred values of the other, and seek out ways to respect and recognise and in that way minimise sacred difference.
And if you want to learn how to do that. Keep coming to Shul. This Shul preferably.
One last thing – if you are interested in this cognitive thing, one of our resident neuroscientists at the Shul (that’s a good phrase right?) and I are talking about Judaism in the brain at a special Friday night dinner next week. You can get a flier at the back of the Shul or book on-line after Shabbat.
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