Buddhist Monks Stage Weeklong Demonstration in Burma

For the last week, thousands of Burmese monks have marched against the repressive Burmese military regime in cities across that nation. This is the largest public demonstration against the junta in nearly 20 years. As the Alliance of All Burmese Buddhist Monks march, chant, and overturn their almsbowls (patam nikkujjana kamma), refusing to accept donations from members of the military regime, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship offers our full support and solidarity.

Burma has lived under direct social and political repression for nearly 20 years, since the democracy uprisings of 1988. The army’s answer to the people’s yearning for freedom in 1988 was the killing of thousands of demonstrators. This repression has in no way abated over the years, bringing with it ethnic cleansing of minority groups, corruption, forced labor, and widespread poverty.

On Tuesday, September 18, 2007, monks demonstrated in cities across Burma. In Sittwe, west of Rangoon, they faced tear gas and gunfire before dispersing. According to reports from exile groups in Thailand, some monks were beaten and arrested. On Wednesday, September 19, more than a 1000 monks in Rangoon marched and briefly occupied the Sule Pagoda in the center of the city, after being barred from the famous Shwedagon Pagoda.

Day by day, we closely follow this news from Burma. These non-violent demonstrations by Buddhist monks are expressions of compassion at a time when the already impoverished nation is staggering under August’s government mandated price hikes. Burma’s monks have historically used techniques on non-violence against oppression. They initiated civil disobedience against British colonialists. They were visible and central in the movement of 1988. In 1990, the sangha declared patam nikkujjana kamma and the government crackdown saw more than 130 monasteries raided, and at least 300 monks forcibly disrobed, arrested, imprisoned, and tortured. As truly engaged Buddhists, Burma’s monks have earned the trust and respect of their nation. Today, they are leading the way to democracy and human rights.

Win Min, a Thai-based Burmese analyst, said the generals were cautious about stirring a public backlash if they acted against the clergy. “It’s a dilemma for the junta. If they don’t crack down on protests by monks, more people will join protests. But if they do, it could trigger massive public outrage against the government,” he said.

We call on all our friends in the international Buddhist community support Burma’s monks as they take a stand for liberation and the end of military rule in this suffering land. We urge Burma’s leaders to meet the monks, and all the millions yearning for freedom with open eyes and ears, and with all weapons set aside. Then Burma will again find its rightful place as a beacon of freedom and dhamma in the world.

Earthlyn Manuel, executive director and Rev. Hozan Alan Senauke, associate director on behalf of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship community

Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?

Many people will say it is morally acceptable to pull a switch that diverts a train, killing just one person instead of the five on the other track. But if asked to save the same five lives by throwing a person in the train’s path, people will say the action is wrong. This may be evidence for an ancient subconscious morality that deters causing direct physical harm to someone else. An equally strong moral sanction has not yet evolved for harming someone indirectly.

By NICHOLAS WADE | The New York Times Published: September 18, 2007

Where do moral rules come from? From reason, some philosophers say. From God, say believers. Seldom considered is a source now being advocated by some biologists, that of evolution.

At first glance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. Could the behaviors evolved by social animals to make societies work be the foundation from which human morality evolved?

In a series of recent articles and a book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, has been constructing a broad evolutionary view of morality that traces its connections both to religion and to politics.

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) began his research career by probing the emotion of disgust. Testing people’s reactions to situations like that of a hungry family that cooked and ate its pet dog after it had become roadkill, he explored the phenomenon of moral dumbfounding — when people feel strongly that something is wrong but cannot explain why.

Dumbfounding led him to view morality as driven by two separate mental systems, one ancient and one modern, though the mind is scarcely aware of the difference. The ancient system, which he calls moral intuition, is based on the emotion-laden moral behaviors that evolved before the development of language. The modern system — he calls it moral judgment — came after language, when people became able to articulate why something was right or wrong.

The emotional responses of moral intuition occur instantaneously — they are primitive gut reactions that evolved to generate split-second decisions and enhance survival in a dangerous world. Moral judgment, on the other hand, comes later, as the conscious mind develops a plausible rationalization for the decision already arrived at through moral intuition.

Moral dumbfounding, in Dr. Haidt’s view, occurs when moral judgment fails to come up with a convincing explanation for what moral intuition has decided.

So why has evolution equipped the brain with two moral systems when just one might seem plenty?

“We have a complex animal mind that only recently evolved language and language-based reasoning,” Dr. Haidt said. “No way was control of the organism going to be handed over to this novel faculty.”

He likens the mind’s subterranean moral machinery to an elephant, and conscious moral reasoning to a small rider on the elephant’s back. Psychologists and philosophers have long taken a far too narrow view of morality, he believes, because they have focused on the rider and largely ignored the elephant.

Dr. Haidt developed a better sense of the elephant after visiting India at the suggestion of an anthropologist, Richard Shweder. In Bhubaneswar, in the Indian state of Orissa, Dr. Haidt saw that people recognized a much wider moral domain than the issues of harm and justice that are central to Western morality. Indians were concerned with integrating the community through rituals and committed to concepts of religious purity as a way to restrain behavior.

On his return from India, Dr. Haidt combed the literature of anthropology and psychology for ideas about morality throughout the world. He identified five components of morality that were common to most cultures. Some concerned the protection of individuals, others the ties that bind a group together.

Of the moral systems that protect individuals, one is concerned with preventing harm to the person and the other with reciprocity and fairness. Less familiar are the three systems that promote behaviors developed for strengthening the group. These are loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority and hierarchy, and a sense of purity or sanctity.

The five moral systems, in Dr. Haidt’s view, are innate psychological mechanisms that predispose children to absorb certain virtues. Because these virtues are learned, morality may vary widely from culture to culture, while maintaining its central role of restraining selfishness. In Western societies, the focus is on protecting individuals by insisting that everyone be treated fairly. Creativity is high, but society is less orderly. In many other societies, selfishness is suppressed “through practices, rituals and stories that help a person play a cooperative role in a larger social entity,” Dr. Haidt said.

He is aware that many people — including “the politically homogeneous discipline of psychology” — equate morality with justice, rights and the welfare of the individual, and dismiss everything else as mere social convention. But many societies around the world do in fact behave as if loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity are moral concepts, Dr. Haidt notes, and this justifies taking a wider view of the moral domain.

The idea that morality and sacredness are intertwined, he said, may now be out of fashion but has a venerable pedigree, tracing back to Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology.

Dr. Haidt believes that religion has played an important role in human evolution by strengthening and extending the cohesion provided by the moral systems. “If we didn’t have religious minds we would not have stepped through the transition to groupishness,” he said. “We’d still be just small bands roving around.”

Religious behavior may be the result of natural selection, in his view, shaped at a time when early human groups were competing with one another. “Those who found ways to bind themselves together were more successful,” he said.

Dr. Haidt came to recognize the importance of religion by a roundabout route. “I first found divinity in disgust,” he writes in his book The Happiness Hypothesis.

The emotion of disgust probably evolved when people became meat eaters and had to learn which foods might be contaminated with bacteria, a problem not presented by plant foods. Disgust was then extended to many other categories, he argues, to people who were unclean, to unacceptable sexual practices and to a wide class of bodily functions and behaviors that were seen as separating humans from animals.

“Imagine visiting a town,” Dr. Haidt writes, “where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex ‘doggie style’ in public, and eat raw meat by biting off pieces directly from the carcass.”

He sees the disgust evoked by such a scene as allied to notions of physical and religious purity. Purity is, in his view, a moral system that promotes the goals of controlling selfish desires and acting in a religiously approved way.

Notions of disgust and purity are widespread outside Western cultures. “Educated liberals are the only group to say, ‘I find that disgusting but that doesn’t make it wrong,’ ” Dr. Haidt said.

Working with a graduate student, Jesse Graham, Dr. Haidt has detected a striking political dimension to morality. He and Mr. Graham asked people to identify their position on a liberal-conservative spectrum and then complete a questionnaire that assessed the importance attached to each of the five moral systems. (The test, called the moral foundations questionnaire, can be taken online, at www.YourMorals.org.)

They found that people who identified themselves as liberals attached great weight to the two moral systems protective of individuals — those of not harming others and of doing as you would be done by. But liberals assigned much less importance to the three moral systems that protect the group, those of loyalty, respect for authority and purity.

Conservatives placed value on all five moral systems but they assigned less weight than liberals to the moralities protective of individuals.

Dr. Haidt believes that many political disagreements between liberals and conservatives may reflect the different emphasis each places on the five moral categories.

Take attitudes to contemporary art and music. Conservatives fear that subversive art will undermine authority, violate the in-group’s traditions and offend canons of purity and sanctity. Liberals, on the other hand, see contemporary art as protecting equality by assailing the establishment, especially if the art is by oppressed groups.

Extreme liberals, Dr. Haidt argues, attach almost no importance to the moral systems that protect the group. Because conservatives do give some weight to individual protections, they often have a better understanding of liberal views than liberals do of conservative attitudes, in his view.

Dr. Haidt, who describes himself as a moderate liberal, says that societies need people with both types of personality. “A liberal morality will encourage much greater creativity but will weaken social structure and deplete social capital,” he said. “I am really glad we have New York and San Francisco — most of our creativity comes out of cities like these. But a nation that was just New York and San Francisco could not survive very long. Conservatives give more to charity and tend to be more supportive of essential institutions like the military and law enforcement.”

Other psychologists have mixed views about Dr. Haidt’s ideas.

Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, said, “I’m a big fan of Haidt’s work.” He added that the idea of including purity in the moral domain could make psychological sense even if purity had no place in moral reasoning.

But Frans B. M. de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, said he disagreed with Dr. Haidt’s view that the task of morality is to suppress selfishness. Many animals show empathy and altruistic tendencies but do not have moral systems.

“For me, the moral system is one that resolves the tension between individual and group interests in a way that seems best for the most members of the group, hence promotes a give and take,” Dr. de Waal said.

He said that he also disagreed with Dr. Haidt’s alignment of liberals with individual rights and conservatives with social cohesiveness.

“It is obvious that liberals emphasize the common good — safety laws for coal mines, health care for all, support for the poor — that are not nearly as well recognized by conservatives,” Dr. de Waal said.

That alignment also bothers John T. Jost, a political psychologist at New York University. Dr. Jost said he admired Dr. Haidt as a “very interesting and creative social psychologist” and found his work useful in drawing attention to the strong moral element in political beliefs.

But the fact that liberals and conservatives agree on the first two of Dr. Haidt’s principles — do no harm and do unto others as you would have them do unto you — means that those are good candidates to be moral virtues. The fact that liberals and conservatives disagree on the other three principles “suggests to me that they are not general moral virtues but specific ideological commitments or values,” Dr. Jost said.

In defense of his views, Dr. Haidt said that moral claims could be valid even if not universally acknowledged.

“It is at least possible,” he said, “that conservatives and traditional societies have some moral or sociological insights that secular liberals do not understand.”

Braving the Past

Shaman wisdom, psychology treat post-traumatic stress disorder

by ALEX deMARBAN Anchorage Daily News | September 17, 2007

After a lifetime of losing friends and family members, including two cousins who killed themselves in a 12-month period, Roy Hancock went on a three-week drunk last year.

As he paced the floor

of an abandoned house in Chistochina, he thought about grabbing a pistol and shooting himself. That’s when a friend showed up and invited him to an unusual therapy program in Anchorage.

Hancock, 45, agreed to go.

“It was that, or put a bullet in my head,” he said.

The program, called White Raven Center, treats clients who suffer symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a severe and stubborn reaction to trauma that includes symptoms such as nightmares, emotional detachment or severe depression.

The disorder is often associated with returning combat soldiers or firefighters who searched the New York City rubble after Sept. 11, 2001.

But it’s common in rural Alaska too, where cultural upheaval mixed with alcoholism has pushed rates of suicide and family violence among the nation’s highest, psychologists say.

The White Raven Center, run by Floyd Guthrie, a Tlingit shaman, and his wife, Marianne Rolland, practices a cathartic therapy that allows clients to revisit memories and unleash feelings in a group setting, often with powerful results.

During one of the center’s monthly three-day sessions in August, 10 clients took turns lying blindfolded on the floor. After breathing for several seconds, they shouted rage or wailed tearfully.

Some cursed parents.

Others stood, slamming a plastic bat against a padded karate shield.

When it was his turn, Hancock lay under a white blanket, clenching and opening tight fists.

“I’m just seeing all these young lives wasted and gone,” the former fisherman said heavily.

Guthrie kneeled beside Hancock, urging him to stay with the memory.

“You carry a lot of hurt in this body,” Guthrie said. “It’s confusing to you as a warrior because you feel like you have to do something.”

Rolland, who calls herself a facilitator because she helps clients heal spiritually and mentally, touched Hancock’s heart with one hand. The other stretched in the air, quivering with his escaping energy, she said.

Generations of Trauma

Rolland and Guthrie, who founded the center out of their East Anchorage home 10 years ago, say they blend Native traditions with contemporary psychology methods like group therapy.

They started practicing after learning the “rapid transformation therapy” treatment from a California shaman, they said.

Clients include Natives and non-Natives, including some from urban areas. Most haven’t been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but many have the symptoms, Guthrie said.

That’s not unusual in rural Alaska, said Bob Chaney, a psychologist with Southcentral Foundation, an Anchorage Native health care organization not affiliated with the center. The disorder is common in the Bush, but how common is unknown, he said.

When psychologists do see rural residents, it’s often the diagnosis, he said.

“It’s an epidemic,” said Chaney, who’s counseled villagers after tragedies for more than a decade.

Some villagers suffer trauma directly, such as through child abuse or the suicide of a loved one. Many suffer a generational post-traumautic disorder that’s caused by cultural change, he said.

For decades, even centuries, villages have been under siege as language and traditions eroded. Many things contributed, such as diseases that killed more than half of Natives in the early 1900s, and shifting from communities of hunter-gatherers into a world that stresses jobs and cash.

Many drank away the stress or used drugs. Some hurt family members or themselves, at times affecting entire villages. Children learned to repeat the behavior.

That cycle is largely why studies over the last two decades continue to show Alaska Natives suffer disproportionately high rates of suicide, alcohol-related deaths, family violence and sexual abuse, Chaney said.

The problems are widespread. Alaska Natives killed themselves at four times the national rate in 2005.

Between 2000 and 2003, Natives made up 36 percent of all domestic-violence victims in Alaska, though they were only 19 percent of the population, according to the Alaska Native Policy Center. Forty-four percent of all sexual assault victims were Native females.

Chaney had never heard of the White Raven Center. But the therapy practiced there sounds similar to therapies offering an alternative to couch-side explorations of emotions over longer periods.

Such therapies encourage victims to recall painful memories, such as through hypnosis or re-enactments, he said.

Some experts criticize the cathartic outbursts such as those at White Raven as re-traumatizing rather than helpful. But it can help if done properly and safely, Chaney said. For example, victims who unleash emotions in group settings may learn they’re not alone.

Burdens Lifted

White Raven clients swear by the sessions.

“I wish everyone could try this,” said Glenn Peters, a 48-year-old Tlingit raised in Juneau.

He learned to ignore sadness growing up, though it filled his life. Drunk parents and family fought openly. He spent years in jail, including for assault and robbery. Police arrested him again last fall after he violated probation by snorting cocaine.

Several years of talking with psychologists did nothing, he said. But his outlook improved after his first weekend at White Raven in June, where he finally felt comfortable enough to express his emotions.

“First time I cried in years,” he said.

Guthrie and Rolland aren’t licensed psychologists, though another White Raven facilitator is. The couple says they learned some techniques from Native and American Indian healers.

For example, clients sing songs to honor ancestors or fan themselves with smoke in smudging rituals.

The therapy works because people can tap into feelings they’ve ignored, shedding bad emotions and focusing on positive ones, Guthrie said. Talking about what they experienced puts their trauma into perspective.

Done Drinking

Clients are treated individually, or in group workshops. Sessions often end well after midnight.

During his session, Hancock cried out for the cousins who killed themselves in 1991 in Chistochina, about 240 road miles northeast of Anchorage. Terry Pence was like a younger brother, Hancock said. Pence was in his early 20s when he shot himself with a rifle in 1991.

“There wasn’t much left of his head,” Hancock said.

The other, a teenage cousin named Frank Charlie who had been abused as a child, then adopted by Hancock’s family, shot himself five months later, affecting everyone in the village of 100.

Hancock, attending his fourth monthly seminar at White Raven in late August, said he still thinks about the two cousins. Memories of them and of other family members who have died in car crashes and other accidents gnawed at him, and he started drinking heavily last winter.

During his first session last year, he screamed and cried for a long time, he said, feelings he usually only expressed while drunk. He can’t express himself well with words, so releasing his emotions is his way of talking through the pain, he said.

Watching others deal with their trauma made his problems seem small, he said.

He still drinks today, but nothing like before, and he credits Guthrie and Rolland. He’s happy most days, and the suicidal thoughts are gone.

“It was kind of like a miracle,” he said.