I wrote an answer to a question on Quora: “What age should you stop spanking your kid?” My answer, which got over 700 upvotes, began: “Never start.”
When I used to battle with various spoil-the-rod co-op moms over the issue, the argument that I think worked best was to point out the power of hope. While fear can be a powerful motivator, it is also a feeling we wish to escape. Hope, on the other hand, is a feeling most of us seek out and cherish. This, I believe, is the underpinning of the greater power of positive reinforcement as a disciplinary tool.
So many of our spiritual traditions are based on fostering hope; what are prayer and heaven but active hoping? Even denial and false hope are regularly deployed as psychological strategies to avert despair and rally our courage. So when hope can be rationally supported and we have good reason to hope for better outcomes, such as is argued in Steven Pinker’s new book Enlightenment Now, (being released in paperback next month) it is some sort common madness to reverse this pattern and opt for a cynical denial of our enduring moral progress. I suppose this madness may be because cynicism is often in vogue as being more hip, and that signalling mutual outrage over societal problems can be an essential tool in tribe building.
But we do have good reason to hope. First, I find the good vs. evil debate to be almost a non sequitur. One way we can define good is that which we hope and wish to be true, and conversely evil as that which we desire to eradicate. Indeed, from a secular perspective, all the moral rules prophets have claimed to be universal and divine mandates, are actually inventions of human minds. And the consistency among most of these, along with the simplest: The Golden Rule, make it clear that we almost universally agree on the goodnesses we wish to prevail, and the evils we wish to quash. For me, this reasoning, as well as the obvious continuation of human history (surely evil would wish for the oblivion of the joie de’ vivre billions of humans experience daily) proves to me that better days are always ahead.
Obama loved to quote MLK: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” (altho MLK put it in quotes himself, with the original attribution going to the Unitarian pastor and transcendentalist, Theodore Parker) Obama even had the phrase woven into the rug of the oval office. He would also often add that the arc not a straight path, but a halting one that may face setbacks, but that he was certain would be, in net, a positive arc.
So please, on this Christmas Eve, try to find hope in your heart by recalling how many horrors of the past are no longer with us, how many evil regimes we have joined together to defeat and abolish, how human sacrifice, torture and slavery, once as common among our tribes as marriage, are now largely extinct. Don’t let the cynics discourage you, have Happy Hollydays as Hope springs eternal.
HOLLY DAYS 