…Contd.
The Respectful Mind is quite easy to explain, but that doesn’t mean it is easy to achieve. The Ethical Mind, as I think about it, is more complex. The respectful mind is no more or no less than what gave rise to the League of Nations and the United Nations. It is recognizing that the world is composed of people who look different, think differently, have different belief and value systems, and that we can no longer be hermits and live in complete isolation. Therefore, our initial choices are to make war, (which is what we did in a tribal society), or to hold our nose and tolerate others. But we can be more ambitious.
We can try to understand better, make common cause with, and give the benefit of the doubt to other people. This process begins with birth. It is how the father, mother or care-taker treats the child; how parents treat one another, how siblings treat one another, etc. I can go to a school in the United States and I can determine within minutes whether there is a respectful atmosphere. You can observe it in the ordinary interactions between teachers, staff, kids and so on.
Here are some examples of no cigar: respect with too many conditions, mere tolerance, bad jokes (jokes at the expense of others), and then something which we are all becoming familiar with: Kiss up or kick down. Kiss up is when you flatter people who are more powerful than you, people that you want something from, and once that dynamic stops, you ignore or give them a kick. There are plenty of examples of disrespect anywhere.
There are promising examples of those who try to institute respect in the world: Commissions in peace and reconciliation which take formerly warring groups, the victims and victimizers, and try to arrive at an understanding which can include forgiveness. As a music lover, I am interested in those musical efforts, such as the Middle Eastern Orchestra (associated with Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said) and The Silk Road Project (associated with Yo-Yo Ma). These are efforts to get people from different societies and cultures to make music together to understand their relationship to music, and to use this kind of “aesthetic ping pong” to break down barriers. And we need to be very much on the look out for whenever institutions and practices can enhance respect.
I actually changed my own mind as a result of this work on respect. Concerning the Danish cartoons that mocked Islam in 2005, my initial reaction as a civil libertarian was to think of free press; people should be able to say and draw what they want. But, I’ve changed my mind about that. I think it was a mistake to publish the cartoons. I wouldn’t put anybody in jail and indeed with blogging nowadays you cannot prevent anybody from transmitting anything on the internet. But I make a distinction between the respectable press and the not respectable press. I think the respectable press should say what it wishes to say clearly—in plain natural language, be it Danish or English-- but not inflammatorily. And I think the Danish cartoons were unnecessarily inflammatory.
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