moral courage – Lion's Whiskers

Courage Book Review: Beautiful Souls

admin — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just finished reading Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times, by Eyal Press (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). This book shares the stories of several people in different times and different walks of life who demonstrated moral courage at great risk: a Swiss border officer who defied the law to help Jews flee from Nazi oppression; a Serb soldier who “identified” Croat prisoners as Serbian to save them from genocide; an Israeli soldier refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories; a financial adviser blowing the whistle on a Ponzi scheme that was bilking thousands of investors of their life savings; a U.S. military prosecutor questioning the treatment of Muslim POWs at Guantanamo Bay. Press interviewed all of these people, trying to dig to the bottom of what causes “ordinary” people to make decisions that turn them into rebels, renegades or outliers. It’s fascinating reading, although somewhat disconcerting. Although Hollywood would have us believe that the moral hero rides into the sunset to the sounds of a grand and inspiring soundtrack, none of these actual moral heroes obeyed their conscience without paying a heavy price.

Press points out that at the very least, refusing to conform stirs anger and resentment among those who are conforming. If you and I are both members of Group A, and I announce that the activities of Group A are morally questionable or even evil, then by implication you accept their validity if you don’t walk out with me. What is striking about the people in these profiles is that they were almost all people who fervently upheld the values and principles of their group originally; it was that very conviction that led them to break ranks when those values became distorted or poisoned. As the military prosecutor poignantly stated, his sworn duty to protect the U.S. Constitution made it impossible for him to accept what he saw without speaking out. Yet the consequences for all these conscientious resistors were significant: social exclusion, financial ruin, loss of security, loss of faith in previously esteemed institutions.

It is difficult to read these stories without feeling some misgivings about moral courage and the price it exacts. Does raising a child to be a good citizen of the world, who has conviction, integrity, and an audible conscience place that child at risk? In my opinion it does, and yet I also hear my own conscience telling me it’s the right thing for me to do.

The Death of Edith Cavell

admin — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A number of years ago I encountered the story of Edith Cavell for the first time and was strongly tempted to write a book about her. The book plan got sidelined, but the story has stayed with me. Edith Cavell was an English nurse at the turn of the 20th century. Professional nursing was still relatively new, and trained nurses and nursing schools were few and far between. Because Cavell had spent time in Belgium in her younger days, she was invited to go there to help start that country’s first professional nursing school.

It was while she was engaged in this project that World War I began, and it wasn’t long before her nursing school was recruited as a full-fledged hospital for Allied soldiers. Belgium, sitting between Germany and France, was the scene of heavy fighting as the German army advanced. Cavell’s hospital was soon filled with wounded English soldiers, and when they recovered sufficiently, Cavell smuggled them to neutral Netherlands so they could return safely to their units, or to England. Over 200 soldiers evaded capture by the German army through her efforts.

For this “crime,” Cavell was eventually arrested by the Germans and tried for treason – and executed by firing squad, despite frantic, international, diplomatic efforts to prevent her sentence from being carried out.

Before facing the firing squad, Cavell famously said, “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”

Looking back through 100 years, we can speculate about the types of courage that may have motivated Nurse Cavell in her choices. Becoming a nurse at all in that day was a risky move – it wasn’t something “nice girls” did. But she did. Then simultaneously running a hospital and a smuggling operation would have required a degree of fortitude and executive management that somewhat boggles the mind. Intellectual courage would have enabled focus and adaptability. We know that she was a devout member of the Anglican church, and it seems fair to say that spiritual courage – that which fortifies us with a sense of purpose and meaning and makes forgiveness possible – was a significant part of her makeup. (She was the daughter of a vicar, and raised with an ethic of sharing). Moral courage was clearly there, as well as the physical courage that nursing requires, especially wartime nursing. She must also have had a very strong internal locus of control to believe that she was capable of effecting change amid the chaos of war, and to act so purposefully in on that conviction.

Much beyond that is difficult to surmise. She was known as a private woman, reserved and formal toward her students and patients. During her court-martial she made no attempt to disavow her activities, and she reportedly went to the firing squad with composure. She was clearly a woman of great courage.

It is important to us on Lion’s Whiskers, however, to make it clear that courageous action is not limited to life-and-death risks such as the ones Edith Cavell took. We have every reason to admire her courage, but we can’t let it convince us that because we haven’t done anything like this and faced a firing squad, we have not shown courage. We are all capable of courage, because the risks we face are proportionate to our capacities and our circumstances. If a teen speaks out against a popular bully and risks ostracism, it is no less courageous because there’s no firing squad in the offing. A social “firing squad” can be devastating, and the number of teens who commit suicide because of it are tragic evidence.

So let Edith Cavell inspire, but not intimidate.

You can read more about Edith Cavell here on the website dedicated to her memory.

The God (or mom) From the Machine

admin — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In my 25 years of writing books for children and teens, I’ve had my share of plot problems. Often, when a writer finds she has written her characters into a situation she can’t quite get them out of, she is tempted by (but must resist!) the deus ex machina solution. This literary term (literally “the god from the machine”) comes to us from ancient Greek drama, and refers to the device of lowering a statue of a god onto the stage to resolve a crisis. Evidently this was perfectly satisfactory to the ancient Greeks, but it is far from satisfactory for us today. When the hero or heroine of a drama gets bailed out of a tricky situation by some unforeseen and improbable stroke of luck, the reader is left feeling cheated. There was no clever resourcefulness, physical skill or moral courage at work to save the day, just a lousy old deus ex machina. “Oh come on, really?” the reader asks. “How convenient.”

When writing for children, with children as protagonists, this is especially difficult to work around. In real life, children aren’t usually left to their own devices to track down jewelry thieves, mediate social conflicts, run their own businesses or invent extraordinary robots that have the Pentagon calling. No. All too often, there is an adult keeping watch (or guard, depending on your view) and managing everything from on high: the Mom from the Machine. (Yes, sometimes it is the Dad from the Machine, but more often the mom.) So when writing children’s fiction there is a delicate balance between plausibility and good plotting.

As Lisa has written previously on her posts on internal v. external locus of control, children must develop confidence in their own agency, their own ability to solve problems, make choices and be responsible for the outcome. The more often the mom ex machina swoops in to take over, the less likely the child is to develop a strong internal locus of control. And just as the deus ex machina solution in a story leaves us feeling rooked, so does the mom ex machina solution in our children’s lives leave a feeling of inadequacy in its wake. So often we relish the role of superhero, enjoying the warm glow of gratitude and appreciation and admiration from the ones we’ve “saved” from a big problem. But unless you are prepared to be lowered from a machine onto your child’s stage in perpetuity, you might consider letting your child learn to be the hero of his own story.

Courage Quotation of the Day

admin — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Physical courage, which despises all danger, will make a man brave in one way; and moral courage, which despises all opinion, will make a man brave in another. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

This Is Your Brain on Stories

admin — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve offered a lot of traditional stories on Lion’s Whiskers over the last several months. How many of you are telling them to your kids? Maybe not a lot of you, and that’s okay! But I hope you have gathered something from these stories. What I hope you have picked up on is this: around the world, in every culture, people have been telling stories not simply for entertainment, but for creating metaphors for understanding their world. I also hope I can persuade you that some form of storytelling – whether with traditional narratives or your own “When I was a kid” yarns – can be a powerful parenting tool, and may help your kids to develop the six types of courage.

I’ve shared a lot of my own anecdotal observations about the power of storytelling, and posted lots of inspiring quotations about the role of stories in our lives. What’s fascinating and exciting is that cutting-edge brain science is beginning to back up the wisdom of the ages. Researchers from many disciplines are using fMRI brain scanning to investigate what actually happens in our brains when we listen to stories. The fields of advertising and journalism have always known how to harness the power of stories; but that power is now part of medical education and law schools, in tax compliance and political discourse, as part of proposed Alzheimer’s treatments, and part of the on-going discussion concerning whether an understanding of narrative can help explain wartime behaviors. Even the defense department is studying whether narrative approaches can help create military leaders with more moral courage.

I want to very briefly (as a layperson, children’s author, and researcher on the importance of story-telling in our culture) summarize some of the findings.

Humans are hardwired for narrative. Evidence is mounting that we are natural storytellers, not by training or by culture, but by biology. The creation of metaphors for understanding our experience is automatic, which helps explain why being presented with facts is often insufficient for decision-making. When we create metaphors for information and experience, they fit more readily into a narrative frame and allow us to imagine how the story might end. Researchers such as Paul Bloom at Yale University’s Mind and Development Lab study babies to figure out how the imagination makes information processing possible, and use puppet plays (stories) to study babies’ moral judgement. “Story,” writes brain scientist Mark Turner, “is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories.”

. Oxytocin is released by stories. Oxytocin, the hormone associated with love and attachment, can be triggered by listening to stories. Oxytocin receptors are located in the pleasure centers of the brain; those stimuli that trigger the release of oxytocin (snuggling, for example) are the ones we seek rather than avoid. This tells us that listening to stories is an adaptation for survival. Oxytocin has also been linked to trust, empathy and moral behavior, and may thus be relevant for creating stable societies.

To an avid reader or storyteller, it’s stating the obvious to say that when we are immersed in a story, we feel excitement when the character feels excitement, grief when the character feels grief. We have all experienced the emotions of the characters we love, especially those with whom we empathize. But not only that, the areas of the brain that register motion are also stimulated when characters in story experience motion. When we say we are moved by a story, this is true in more ways than one. The brain lights up as if the listener (or reader) is actually in the story, fighting dragons and falling in love.

So how is this related to courage development in our children? Dr. Lisa has discussed oxytocin’s role in promoting attachment which contributes significantly to courage development and resiliency in children. If storytelling, too, triggers oxytocin release, then we can speculate that storytelling also has a role in both deepening the connection in secure attachment relationships and inspiring courage and moral development in our children. On top of that, we have the connection between fear and uncertainty: because storytelling is a human adaptation for interpreting and making sense of experience, it may help reduce uncertainty, and by extension, reduce fear. Stories offer us the opportunity for mental, imaginative, neurobiological rehearsal of experiences we may encounter in the future. Just as champion athletes use visualization techniques to ready themselves for the contest to come (a form of storytelling), we can use stories to prepare ourselves and our children for the challenges of the future.

Whether you retell the traditional stories I’ve offered on this blog, pick a book from my bookshelf to read your child, or you like sharing family stories and taking turns narrating your day’s events at dinnertime, stories are powerful, free and abundant. They are what make us human and inspire us all to have courage in life. As the Native American saying goes, “Take courage from the story.”

Is There Only One Right Answer?

admin — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Here on the Lion’s Whiskers blog we have had much to say, recently, on the topic of moral courage and morality – how it is learned, how we can help our children develop it and how we can support it in them and ourselves. In its simplest terms, we can say that being guided by a moral conscience means being able to tell the difference between right and wrong, good or bad. And although there are certainly cultural differences that shade those words, “right” , “wrong”, “good” and “bad” in slightly different tones, I suspect most people would agree that if they saw a child bite another child and grab the toy away, they would discourage that behavior; and if they saw a child helping another one to stand up after a fall, I suspect they would mostly all want to encourage that. A deeper appreciation will also involve understanding why something is right or wrong, good or bad, understanding what values may be involved and why we might want to promote them. Our justice system recognizes a difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, and a robust conscience will always, I hope, seek to follow the spirit behind the letter rather than rigidly adhering to the letter and allowing the spirit be distorted. Children can be adroit litigators, triumphantly reminding us of our exact words when we suspect they knew full well what we meant to imply when we said them. This is definitely good training for a parent or teacher in being really really really crystal clear, but it also leaves behind the uneasy feeling that some moral quicksand may be nearby, that queasy sensation that my child just “got away with” something right in front of my eyes, and we both know it. We want our children to consider our explicit words and their implicit meaning, taking account of what our family’s lived ethics are.

This capacity for seeking, questioning, interpreting and choosing is moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is a process that can easily produce two or more “right” responses to a situation just as it may discover more than one “wrong” response. What I wonder about is an education system that places so much emphasis on high stakes standardized testing, and whether children are internalizing the message that when it really counts, there is only one right answer. The stress and anxiety associated with these tests is bad enough, but I wonder about other possible effects as well. There may be only one right answer to the algebra problem, but if that postulate – that there is but one right answer – is carried over into other parts of our children’s lives, what then?

I don’t know if this is happening or not. I can share an anecdote from my teaching experience, however. For many years I have visited schools around the U.S. as a guest author, often giving writing and researching workshops as part of my visit. On one such trip to a Texas middle school I tried to demonstrate to the students how I interpret historical photographs, extrapolating information from the observable details. What met this lesson was an almost complete inability – or unwillingness – to hazard a guess, to propose a possible interpretation, to reason from the evidence. Repeated urging got me nowhere. “Do you see leaves on the trees in the photograph? No? So do you think this picture was taken in the summer? Do the people appear to you to be warmly dressed? Are they engaged in leisurely activities or do they appear to be under any stress?” Later, over lunch with the librarian who had invited me, I asked her about the students’ stifled response. “They won’t guess,” she said. “They don’t like to make inferences. They won’t draw conclusions in case they are wrong.” I have shared this anecdote with other librarians and teachers around the country, and been told it did not surprise them.

Does that necessarily tell us anything about these kids’ ability to engage in moral reasoning? I don’t know. But I do know that the world is full of nuance and subtle differences in interpretation, and I’m not sure that lots and lots of practice filling in bubbles on test forms under stress is likely to be good preparation for that. Moreover, it seems more likely to result in people who follow the letter, rather than the spirit, of the law. All the more reason to engage our kids in lively ethical debate at home, giving them room and time to find their way, reason their way, to a response that makes sense to them, that feels ‘right.‘

Dear reader, if you have a strong rebuttal to my proposition, please share. I’d like to be proven wrong.

As an aside, here is an article from the Washington Post about what happened when a school board member took the standardized tests his state requires of 10th graders.

Courage Question of the Day

admin — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Here at Lion’s Whiskers we are hoping to collect kids’ definitions for some of the values most commonly associated with moral courage.

We would appreciate your help!

Could you ask your children to define, in their own words, one or more of the following? Please send us their age, first name (if you are comfortable), country, and what they understand these words to mean.

Loyalty
Trust
Honesty
Integrity
Accountability
Responsibility
Fairness
Impartiality
Justice

You may be impressed, surprised, or even shocked by what your child has already learned, or not, about what these powerful words mean to them in their life. We hope the discussion prompts new insights and hope you will share with us your learning! Thanks for your help! Send your responses to: [email protected]

Surviving the Lion AND the Fox!

admin — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I found a very interesting story the other day that highlights moral courage in an unusual way. Animal fables typically offer the lion and the fox as examples of physical courage and intellectual courage, brawn vs. brains. Here we have a story from the very old Gypsy tradition, a story which demonstrates a different way an outcast group manages to survive. I found The Lion, the Fox, and the Bird in The Fish Bride and Other Gypsy Tales, retold by Jean Russel Larson. This is book well worth reading if you can find it. I’ll just summarize this story briefly.

In this story, a new bird arrives in a part of the forest that is home to a lion and a fox. Not being a fast flyer, the bird is warned by everyone to leave. “I’ll have to get the lion and the fox to leave,” the bird replies. “It’s really too dangerous to have them here.” While the lion and the fox are both contemplating the nice meal they’ll make of the bird, the bird turns the tables on them both by appealing for help. The bird asks the lion to perform an act of physical strength (moving some fallen trees to reveal the berry bushes) and the fox to figure out how to get reeds from the pond for building a nest (he tells the herons that the fishing will be better if they pull out the reeds). Both lion and fox are stymied by this appeal to their generosity, as they cannot eat someone they’ve helped, and they must help when someone weaker asks for assistance. Once they have taken responsibility for the bird by helping, they must do the right thing and leave it be. Hungry, and rather baffled at having chosen not to eat the bird, the lion and the fox leave that part of the forest and search for somebody else to eat.

I find this fable fascinating for its insight into the tenuous social status of the nomadic Gypsies, or Rom, as they call themselves. Always being an outsider who is greeted with suspicion means that they must get others to do the right thing themselves, rather than trick them (like a fox) or overpower them (like a lion). Next time the Rom pass this way they don’t want to find revenge or bitterness waiting for them. If instead they find people who have already chosen not to hurt them, that’s the best outcome!

Moral courage, as we have said on Lion’s Whiskers, entails discerning and doing the right thing. It speaks to the character traits of responsibility, accountability, and integrity, among others. Sometimes doing the right thing means finding a way to encourage others to do the right thing, especially when their own moral courage is on the wane. People who hold power (bosses, political leaders, corporate stakeholders, etc.) are likely to bristle when we hold them accountable for the things they are busy rationalizing or justifying; and when our children hold us accountable we may feel that bristling in ourselves. I know I do! Integrity and accountability aren’t always very comfortable in the moment, but they usually result in a better night’s sleep.

Courage Quote of the Day

admin — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice. ”

~Confucius

To learn more about what we mean by “Moral Courage”, click here!