Seth Zuihō Segall: In Praise Of Pluralism

Seth Zuiho Segall is a Zen priest in the White Plum Asanga and Zen Peacemaker Order lineages. He is a retired clinical psychologist who served as an Assistant Clinical Professor at the Yale School of Medicine. We talk about making sense of life through the practice of psychology, Buddhism, and philosophy. We also talk about values and the importance of pluralism in modern liberal democratic societies.
Interviewer: Serge Prengel has been exploring creative ways to live with an embodied sense of meaning and purpose.
This track mentions some topics (abortion, war, death) that may be triggering to some of our listeners.

Transcript

Hi Seth.

Hello Serge,

Good morning.

So maybe to talk a little bit about who you are,

I start with a question.

How come somebody who's a psychologist,

Who trained a lot of psychologists,

Is now a Zen minister and very preoccupied with philosophy,

All kinds of philosophical approaches to life?

Well that's a really good question and let's let's feel our way into it and explore it a bit.

I discovered Buddhist practice and Buddhism maybe about 20 years,

10,

15,

20 years into my practicing as a psychologist when I came across a TV program on PBS that filmed a segment on Jon Kabat-Zinn teaching meditation to chronic pain patients and at the time I had a fair number of chronic pain patients I was treating and I was using biofeedback and hypnosis and a variety of other methods to try to treat it and was never really very satisfied with it.

And when I saw this film it was a Bill Moyers program called The Healing of the Mind that featured Jon Kabat-Zinn and I watched him talking to these chronic pain patients as they were meditating.

It kind of woke up some seed in me that had been planted many many years ago.

When I was an undergraduate,

A fellow by the name of Alan Watts came to our school and stayed for about a week and gave a series of lectures on Zen and related topics and I was absolutely fascinated by what he had to say and for a while was very much taken with it.

Say at the age of 18 I was reading everything I could on Buddhism that existed back in the 1960s which wasn't a great deal but it was like a kind of a bookstand Buddhism.

There wasn't anywhere to go with it,

There weren't any teachers nearby,

There wasn't a sangha or community I could belong to.

So it just became a kind of an intellectual thing and at the time even at 18 I thought of myself as a Buddhist at that point but it really never went anywhere.

And then as I completed my graduate studies in psychology or as I started the family all that receded into the background it became kind of my past and I think in watching Kabat-Zinn doing this work it kind of reawakened that oh I remember what that was all about and that was really important to me at one point and is there a way I can integrate that into what I'm doing now.

So I asked the people at Kabat-Zinn's center over at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester,

I asked them could I do an internship with them and they said yeah you can do an internship but first you have to have had a meditation practice that's at least a year old daily meditation practice and you have to have been on at least one 10 day silent Buddhist meditation retreat.

And so I said okay so that's kind of how I got started and then once I had done that I figured I needed a Buddhist teacher so I went to a conference in the late 1990s in Boston called the first conference on Buddhism in America and I heard teachers from all different varieties of schools give Dharma talks and I was able to talk with them and I picked out a couple of people I thought it'd be great to study with.

One was Larry Rosenberg who runs the Cambridge Massachusetts Insight Meditation Center and the other is Tony Packer who the late Tony Packer used to run the Springwater Center.

So I did lots of retreats with them and with people with a lot of the insight meditation people,

Some Tibetan teachers.

Anyway so that was the beginning of practice and I remember sitting there on my first 10 day retreat with a teacher,

Late teacher whose name was Ruth Dennison at the time and I remember listening to her Dharma talks and I'm going hmm that's really kind of what I already believe you know except I've never really articulated in that way before.

So I found myself immediately at home and the first time I sat down to meditate with the John Kappenzin's group I immediately said this is something I want for the rest of my life.

It just felt so extraordinary to me and I found it life-changing for me in all kinds of ways.

I found it added to my ability to be immediately present with myself and with other people,

To be more present in my body,

Be more embodied.

It made it more possible for me to be able to get in contact with the felt sense instead of thinking about things in my head all the time,

Understanding what the wisdom of the body is all about.

I mean these are really tremendous changes and as I continue to practice though I also found myself in a dissonance with a lot of the ideas in Buddhism.

I mean many of them I agree with but many I didn't.

And so teachers would say various things and I go wait a minute do I really believe that?

And at some point along this journey I had joined a philosophy group,

A book reading group,

Over at my local library and the very first book we read was Aristotle's Ethics and it was another extraordinary approach to looking at the ethical life besides the Buddhist approach.

It had a lot in common with it but some differences and and that intrigued me.

So I wrote this book a couple years ago called Buddhism and Human Flourishing which compared Aristotle's path with the Buddhist path and tried to integrate them in some way that really kind of aligned with what I thought was true.

And then in subsequent years I began studying Chinese.

As a Zen priest you come across a lot of writings that are based in Chinese writings.

I wanted to be able to read them for myself and so I started studying and then that led to studying Confucius.

And all of a sudden I said here's another kindred person like Aristotle and like the Buddha.

He's interested in the same sorts of questions.

He's interested in an ethical revolution and within his own time.

And isn't it interesting to see how these three systems have some commonalities between them but also differences.

And so just intellectually I was interested in kind of understanding the similarities and differences between these systems.

And then coming to the conclusion which is not a you know a lot of people read all the philosophers and they read Spinoza and Hume and Nietzsche and everybody else and they say well who's right who's right.

And the point is none of them are right.

But they all offer some different vision okay that we can take something from and can enrich our lives in some kind of way.

And I thought well yeah I mean we don't want to necessarily be ancient Buddhists or ancient Confucians or ancient Aristotelians.

But maybe there's stuff we can get from all of that that's valuable for us to carry forward in a new way today.

Maybe not the way they exactly meant it but the way that resonates for us today.

So that's been my focus.

How can I take the things that I've learned on these three different journeys four different if you include psychology as well.

How can you take those and come up with something new that might be relevant to the way we live today.

Yeah.

You used the phrase when you were talking about Confucius talking about him as a kindred spirit or another kindred spirit.

And what strikes me when you describe your journey is essentially you finding kindred spirits who express maybe better than you would have something that already is in you and helps you develop it.

And then a sense of having a conversation with these kindred spirits that informs the practice life.

And also there's a kind of otherness to them as well.

I mean there's a kind of alterity.

There's a way in which because they're ancient figures from a different culture at a different time they think differently about things than we do today.

And that's valuable too to say hey the way we think about things maybe isn't always the right way to do it.

You know maybe somebody else had some vision too that's worthwhile appropriating in some kind of way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So maybe somebody had better ideas had a vision but you also mentioned of how that quest started with a sense of the limitations of or your own you know critical concepts about Buddhism saying oh I love a lot of things and there's some things that I question.

Yes absolutely.

Yeah.

I must have listened to thousands of talks from teachers over the last 25-30 years and there's probably not a single talk I ever heard or hardly a single talk I ever heard where I agreed with everything the teacher said.

My mind is always going well I don't know about that.

I don't know about that.

Is that true?

How do I feel about that?

So there's constant chatter that goes in the mind as you hear this.

And yes I think there's plenty to criticize about.

I mean first of all there isn't one Buddhism.

There are many many different Buddhisms both historically and culturally over the years and they don't all agree on very much.

But if you think about some of the main things that most of the schools agree on there are points that I disagree with very rigorously.

They have a lot to do with the idea of the perfectibility of human beings and their ability to transcend their basic natures.

And I think there are real limitations on how much we can change ourselves.

How much we can be different from ourselves.

And plus there are things about that final vision of what well-being is that don't strike me as well-being.

If you're talking about giving up all attachments or all desires.

There's nothing very attractive to me about that.

I want a vision that enlarges human possibilities,

Human life and doesn't help people by subtracting from them.

Right.

Yeah.

So that sense of an engaged dialogue and that sense of expanding from there.

So we're not talking about finding some kind of sameness in all the traditions even though there may be a lot of sameness.

But actually engaging in a dialogue that focuses on both similarities and differences as a way to helping you and helping all of us figure out how to manage being in the world.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And even the differences between the systems are intriguing.

You can say,

Well,

How come Aristotle stresses courage so much,

Andrea?

Courage.

And how come the other traditions don't mention it at all as a major virtue?

Or how come Plato talks so much about justice as being a crucial virtue?

And justice is never mentioned in the Buddhist tradition as a kind of a concept.

I mean,

There are times when the Buddha tells kings to share their wealth with the people and make sure everyone's well-fed and safe and so forth.

And there's a sense of karmic justice,

Right?

There's a universal justice in that sense.

People get their just desserts.

But nowhere does the Buddha ever talk about justice.

Yeah.

How come?

And these differences between the systems are intriguing.

What does it say about the cultures they came from or the particular blinders they had within that culture and so on?

Yeah.

Or what problems were more apparent and required more attention?

Well,

It's interesting.

For example,

If you take courage,

And Aristotle takes military courage as his kind of exemplar of that.

These were all people who lived in war-torn areas where war was a constant.

The local Indian cultures,

The Chinese cultures,

Confucius is writing during the warring states period in China,

Which is probably the bloodiest part of Chinese history.

And certainly,

Athens is involved in the Peloponnesian Wars and all the other wars that they're involved with,

The wars against Persia.

How come it only strikes Aristotle that it's important to talk about this?

And yet,

Confucius doesn't mention it at all,

Although it's implicit in some ways.

When you think about the unerring Confucian scholar who is always doing what he thinks is right,

That means he has to resist all these pressures,

But he's going to get to do what's wrong.

So there has to be some kind of courage that this person has,

But it's never explicit in quite the way it is in Aristotle.

Yeah.

So maybe there is an implicit quality of courage.

And so,

In looking at the different systems,

Maybe more of the various virtues are present,

But under different appearances.

As you point out,

Doing the right thing is something that's impossible to do without courage.

So,

How does this,

How does it fit for you,

For all of us as a modern person,

Reading these various systems and discovering one thing or another,

Being present here,

Being missing there?

Well,

You can ask the question,

If you'd like to,

How many virtues are there?

And the point is that it's an indeterminate list,

That I couldn't list everything that I think of as a virtue.

And you can say,

Well,

How come you left that out?

Or how come that's on the list?

I don't think that belongs there.

And so,

There's a constant process of collective inquiry about what are the virtues that are relevant for us today in this world,

In this society.

And it's not as if you ever come up with a definitive list.

So,

You can say things like equanimity and courage and kindness and compassion.

We can say those are virtues for us today,

And they're meaningful ones.

And we can make a list of other ones as well,

Conscientiousness and so forth.

And we can come up with a theory about why they're virtues.

Interestingly enough,

Aristotle never makes up a theory about why his virtues are virtues.

These are just things that the people in the aristocracy of his day seem to think are important,

So he mentions them.

But it's also possible to come up with a theory about what makes something a virtue,

Some kind of vision of what human flourishing is,

What it means to live the best possible life.

And then what are the habits or states of mind or attributes that contribute to successfully living that kind of life and achieving the kind of goals that you want in life.

And so,

We can call those skills,

Certain set of skills in living,

Are virtues for us.

But they're virtues because of the fact that they contribute to flourishing,

Or they're part of our image of flourishing itself.

Yeah.

So,

The discussion of virtues is within a context,

Which is,

What is it that actually is going to favor human flourishing,

Both on an individual level and at the level of society?

And the things that help favor flourishing are going to be virtues,

And those that don't are not.

Exactly.

And with the understanding that every society is different,

And the kinds of virtues that lead to well-being within that society and what's possible for people in terms of well-being are going to be different,

So that a warrior society and an honor society and a hunter-gatherer society,

For example,

May have very different sets of virtues that enable you to live well than,

Say,

Large industrial democracies.

Yeah.

So,

This is an invitation to notice how virtues are rooted in history and sociology.

And so,

To both find some kind of a nurture in seeing something that's been there for a long time,

Respected as a virtue,

But also a sense of paying attention to how it fits within the context of how we live today.

Right.

And things that may be a virtue at one point may not be a virtue at another point.

So,

That requires constant inquiry into,

Is this still part of flourishing?

Is it still meaningful for flourishing in this time and era?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so,

Almost as a virtue itself is the notion of inquiry.

Right.

So,

I would say that,

You know,

Just as Aristotle listed moral and intellectual virtues,

And today we might call that virtue and wisdom,

We might separate them into two baskets,

But they're not really.

I would say that the ability to maintain an attitude of open inquiry into values is part of what constitutes wisdom today.

Yeah.

And it's really the endeavor that,

Say,

Socrates was engaged in when he was asking,

What is justice?

He understands that in the past,

In the Homeric era,

You know,

Virtue meant one thing.

And here in this later era where we have all the great dramatists and comedians and so forth writing,

Well,

Maybe these things mean something different today in these modern societies,

Modern in Socrates' time.

And in fact,

He inquires of everyone,

What is justice?

And everyone comes up with a slightly different answer.

And the end point of this is not that there is no such thing as justice,

But that its meaning is slippery in some kind of way,

That there's always a new way to understand it and given a new context.

Yes.

So,

Very much a sense that the practice of living is a practice of inquiry.

And with the idea that while we make conclusions to live from moment to moment,

This is also a practice that never ends.

That's right.

There's no discernible end to it whatsoever.

And that's what I see.

That's what I didn't like about my old ideas of Buddhism,

That there was a path and you reach the end of it.

I don't think there's an end.

There's just always more.

There's always more to understand and more to appreciate and more ways to grow.

There is no end to history and therefore.

.

.

And no end to the ways we may change over a lifetime in the way we understand things.

And I think it's an exciting vision.

Yeah.

And the way you're describing it,

The way you have lived it is a mixture of inquiry at a personal level of contemplative inquiry,

But also an intellectual inquiry.

Yes.

And I would say,

Personally,

Being a therapist,

That being a therapist is also another way of inquiring because it's a way of testing,

In a way,

The theories with what happens with other people as well.

Yeah.

That the theories are just theories,

They're not truths.

And when you have a real patient in front of you,

Confront with a real life situation,

A real life problem,

They may not fit any theories.

It may be something brand new that hasn't been seen before.

And so this attitude is an attitude of being open,

Of being curious and open,

Feeling relatively safe to not be so fragile when contradictions happen.

And it's obviously not too widely shared in the societies in which we live.

So how do we adapt to having that ideal in a way that we cannot find kindred spirits in every other human being we encounter?

Well,

You know,

I call my book,

The subtitle of my book is Virtue,

Wisdom and Pluralism.

And I think the next thing I want to emphasize is the idea of pluralism,

That we don't live in a world where we all see things the same way and we all agree on things.

And that's as obvious today as it's ever been.

And yet somehow we have to navigate being in the world where people have very different worldviews and different ideologies and very different beliefs about what the good life constitutes.

And to me,

The heart of liberalism,

As I understand it,

Is a willingness to,

If not celebrate,

At least tolerate these differences and say they have a right to exist because there isn't any kind of one way to get the world right.

You know,

But the question is,

Can people with different worldviews live together in some kind of compatible way?

And we have examples of that here in the United States.

We have,

For example,

The Amish who don't believe in driving motor cars and so forth and don't believe in having all these newfangled devices.

And they live all throughout the Northeast in their own communities.

And they don't insist that everybody else drive buggies.

It's okay for them if they live their life,

But they don't insist anyone else live their life.

Or we can look at the Orthodox Jews here in various communities in New York,

Where for the most part,

They live their own lives.

They don't go on the internet.

There are all kinds of things that they won't do.

They go to their schools and they don't learn the kinds of things that we learn in terms of mathematics and science and so forth.

And yet they're,

For the most part,

Content within their own communities.

And they don't insist that everybody else follow their educational model.

You know,

They say,

This is the way we live,

But we can live in this society.

Occasionally there are clashes over who controls a school system and so forth,

You know,

As more and more Orthodox move into a community.

But for the most part,

You know,

We managed to live together.

And the question is,

Can that be a model?

Mormons,

For example,

You know,

Had a difficulty fitting in with the United States.

They believed in plural marriage to begin with.

It was a question that whether Utah would be admitted to the union or not.

They reached some kind of compromise on this.

Not every Mormon follows that.

You know,

There's still Mormons who follow the old ways.

But somehow Mormons managed to live in society and do well,

Even though most people aren't Mormons.

We have all kinds of examples of people with different beliefs getting along reasonably well together.

So the question is,

When does that,

Being able to live together in relative peace,

When is that contract shattered?

And it's shattered mostly when some group decides that everybody else has to follow the way that they live,

When they deny the idea of pluralism.

So I think it's important that we teach that in schools and families and elsewhere,

This idea of pluralistic tolerance.

So to put it another way,

Talking about how values that are important are related to what society there is,

As we live in a society where there are a lot of different cultures,

The importance of pluralism is even more important.

And so we're talking about the teaching of pluralism,

Not as some abstraction,

But as some kind of embodied way of living,

Is the oil that makes the machine work better.

Yes.

Just from a practical point of view,

Absolutely.

But also from a philosophical point of view.

I mean,

I think,

I always think about Isaiah Berlin in this regard,

Who was the British philosopher who said that all the goals that we aspire to in life don't form a unified whole.

That being,

Say,

A successful businessman might not totally be coherent with being a good family man or being a spiritual person.

I mean,

We have all kinds of things we aspire to in our lives and we make trade-offs between them in various ways.

And different people will come up to different conclusions about how to trade off,

How much quality is needed versus how much liberty is needed and so forth.

These are all values that clash.

And so we always have to make compromises in some way between them.

And accepting that that's really the way life is and that naturally different people are going to see things differently.

I think it's just an important lesson in how to live life with other people.

Yeah.

Or with oneself,

Essentially,

Because when we're talking about conflicts,

You were mentioning the Isaiah Berlin concept of goals may be different and contradictory.

So we are in conflict with different parts of ourselves.

Absolutely.

There's different people,

Different cultures,

Different perspectives clashing in society.

And essentially,

We come to that notion of an acceptance of the inevitability of conflict.

So almost coming back to the first noble truth of the inevitability of suffering and replacing it with a concept of the inevitability of conflict and finding a way to actually deal with the inevitable existence of conflict.

That's right.

Well said.

I couldn't say it better.

Yeah.

There's another major teaching in all this for me,

As I'm looking at Confucius and Aristotle and the Buddha,

And that is that none of them believed in the kind of individualism that we tend to believe in nowadays in society.

We have this view that's kind of slowly formed over the last 500 years in the West.

And part of that's just the history of the Renaissance and the Age of Reason and the Protestant Reformation and the Romantic era and all these different ages that contributed to who we are.

But there's a sense of us as individuals who,

As John Locke said,

Kind of got together to agree to form society as if it was a social contract.

And whenever I heard that,

I always said,

Well,

Nobody ever asked me whether I wanted to agree or not.

And the fact is that we don't agree to form communities or countries and nations.

We are born into them.

We're born into families.

It's just human nature to be part of social organizations.

There's no place where that's not true.

And so we have to,

As Aristotle said,

We're not only rational animals,

But social animals.

And I think that all the,

You know,

Buddha certainly emphasizes the interconnectedness of everything,

That we're not separate from the environment.

We're not separate from culture.

We're not separate from anything.

We were all inter-affecting each other constantly.

And Confucius had this very,

Very rich social vision about how the family and the state and the individual and morality for all three of them are deeply intertwined.

And,

You know,

I think and I think we've gone too far in one direction here in the West,

In terms of looking at individual liberty and our separateness as the most important thing.

And that we have to kind of swing back a little bit,

Not to lose what we've gained in this,

Because there are good things about individuals and the idea of having inalienable rights or having the right to express ourselves.

I mean,

These are all good things,

But we also have to realize that there are limits that we live as part of an organism,

So to speak.

And what we do has to contribute to everyone's well-being,

Not just our own.

Otherwise,

Life becomes,

As Hobbes said,

Nasty,

Brutish,

And short.

So I just think about,

For example,

The fact that Australians are also somewhat of a Western society,

But are much more socially minded.

That Australians died,

The death rate was one-tenth the American death rate during COVID,

Because Australians wore their damn masks,

You know.

They didn't think it's my right not to wear a mask.

And it's the same thing in all the Confucian societies in Taiwan and Japan and Vietnam and Korea and so forth.

I mean,

They all,

Everyone got vaccinated,

Everyone wore their masks,

And they were able to keep the death rate much lower than we did here.

And there are many,

Many other examples you can give,

But certainly in East Asia and other places in the world,

People have a much more sense of being an integral part of communities,

And not just being kind of lone wolves who are kind of occasionally agreeing to be together.

So I think we need to do something that,

I mean,

The Chinese go too far in the other direction,

In terms of a collective understanding of well-being,

And we're too far in the individualistic side,

But there's someplace maybe where we can,

You know,

Reach a synthesis between these.

Yeah,

Yeah.

And so,

As an individual,

You know,

Thinking of it in terms of how can I put this more into my embodied understanding of life,

You know,

How do we do that?

I mean,

Certainly the experience of meditation helps go beyond the experience of a limited self.

I'm just wondering how we can strengthen that a little more.

And find practices in life that help us remember that there's more to us than being an isolated unit.

What a good question.

It's related to another question.

Let's put it this way.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor asked the question,

Gee,

We have our loyalty to our immediate family and our kin,

Or our tribe.

And then we have a more general sense that we should have goodwill for all mankind in some kind of way.

But there's a clash between these two.

And kind of when times are flush,

And there's plenty,

And there's no shortages,

We can be very generous to everybody.

And then when we're under adversity,

Or hardship,

Or scarcity,

All of a sudden we circle the wagons and,

You know,

My tribe or my family first.

So there's a real disconnection in terms of our natural understanding of what it means to care about other people.

And then we can ask,

Are there resources within the moral repertoire of our culture that enable us to transcend that?

Okay,

So for example,

In Christianity,

You have the parable of the Good Samaritan as an example.

But we can probably look at every culture,

And they have examples of what it means to help someone.

In the Old Testament,

29 times,

I think it says,

To love the stranger,

Not love your neighbor,

But love the stranger,

You know.

So there are moral resources that we can rely on,

Or stories we can rely on.

But there's also,

I think,

Some inner feeling that you either have or you don't have about these sorts of things.

You know,

I can remember,

You think about what Albert Schweitzer talks about,

In terms of the kind of,

I'm trying to remember what his phrase is,

But I'm trying to remember what his phrase is.

The kind of,

I'm trying to remember what his phrase is,

But the idea of the love of all creation,

So to speak,

Sanctity of life,

That's the one he uses.

Or you can think about John Dewey,

And when he writes about natural piety,

Which is a kind of an awe at life and nature and everything else,

And feeling connected to it in some kind of meaningful way.

And I've certainly had experiences on retreat,

Where I just feel this overwhelming love for everything I come across.

You know,

I take a walk after having meditated for a couple of days,

And I would just want to cry because everything looks so beautiful,

And I feel so much outpouring of love for it.

And,

You know,

Not just people,

But trees and rocks and clouds and everything.

It's an amazing experience.

And I think if you have some experience like that,

It becomes a ground that you can always have within that says,

Wait a minute,

Everybody matters,

Everything matters.

You know,

It's our job in life to take care of everything that falls within the little circle of our life,

And make it better in some kind of way.

And that includes inanimate objects,

As well as,

You know,

People and animals and plants and so forth.

We try to keep our house neat and our bed made and all those things.

So it's something I feel very deeply,

You know,

That this is my living responsibility in terms of everything that I meet and encounter in life to somehow improve the situation,

Not just for me,

But for the other as well.

But if you don't have that naturally,

If you're feeling about life as dog-eat-dog competition,

And morality is for saps,

And just get the most you can for yourself,

And whoever has the most toys at the end dies,

When he dies wins.

If you have that kind of philosophy,

Then I don't know how you get from there to a more compassionate understanding of the suffering of all beings.

Yeah,

Well,

I think there's probably in some cases,

It's impossible.

But in the middle,

What you're outlining is essentially a practice of giving ourselves an experience,

An opportunity to see the world in a different way.

So you were talking about the fact that when everything goes well,

It's easier to be generous with others.

And when things get tighter,

Then,

You know,

We kind of tighten up and don't want to give.

But the experience of actually noticing how good it feels to open up and feel part of something larger,

If it's not experienced as some kind of a punishment,

You have to do this,

You know,

You have to deprive yourself of what you have.

But as a chance for an enrichment,

It becomes actually something that helps expand for most of us,

The possibility of feeling some joy and connection.

Yeah,

I'd agree with that.

I think that's true.

That feels right to me.

It's interesting.

There's a contemporary Chinese scholar by the name of Tao Jiang.

And he looks at all the different 100 schools of philosophy during the warring states period in China,

In not only Confucianism,

But Taoism and Moism and legalism and all these different schools of thought.

And he says,

Is there a central issue around which they all revolve?

And the answer is yes.

It's the question of a selfish or self-referential love for you and your family and your kin,

Versus what do you owe in the way of justice to everybody?

And they were struggling with that issue.

Every one of these philosophies came up with a different answer to that question,

But they're really all debating each other about it.

And you see the same question in Greek tragedy at this time,

Like in the story of Antigone,

Where her brother is left unburied by King Creon,

And she has to decide whether to listen to the king and obey him and leave her brother unburied,

Or whether to take the body and privately bury it because she owes that to her brother against the king's decree.

There's that question about family morality versus the larger society morality.

And there's a way of thinking about the way societies were organizing at that time,

That that became a central problem for people,

That when you're in small little hunter-gatherer societies,

That wasn't such a big issue.

But as soon as you establish administrative states and bureaucratic structures that are somewhat far away from us,

The Chinese say,

The sky is high and the emperor is far away.

As soon as you begin establishing something like that,

Then there's immediate conflict about what do you owe to whom?

And I think it's something we human beings have been struggling with since,

You know,

2500 years ago.

Yeah,

Yeah.

So we come back to that notion of dealing with conflict as essentially part of the human condition.

Yeah.

So example,

There are examples in Confucian philosophy about what happens if a king has a father who breaks the law?

Okay,

Does filial piety demand that you protect your father,

Or does being the king and the administrative just land demand that you put your father,

You know,

In jail for that?

And the different Confucian philosophers came up with different answers to that.

Confucius believed you never harm your father.

My God,

That's the worst defense ever against heaven.

Whereas Mencius said,

No,

No,

There's a real conflict here.

What you have to do is you have to quit being king,

You abdicate,

And then you take your father and you run away to another country and protect them.

But they all had different answers for,

You know,

What do you owe to different parts of your life?

It's an interesting question.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah.

Yeah,

Yeah.

So the notion of different answers,

And maybe that's a good place to stop.

Just want to see if you want to add something,

Or if we end on that notion of,

It's impossible to not have different answers to the various challenges of life and the sense of dealing with that.

Yeah.

There is one other place I want to go.

And there's,

I think what you said is just right.

And there's a practical problem of what do you do when different parts of society cannot agree?

And when does that disagreement,

When is it tolerable?

And when does it become intolerable?

And when it becomes intolerable,

When are you allowed to resort to force,

For example,

Instead of persuasion in a situation like that?

I mean,

We have that problem during the Civil War,

Where people found slavery intolerable.

Okay.

And weren't willing to tolerate that.

Oh,

Well,

Let some states be slave and some states be free.

Okay.

And we're reaching similar kinds of problems like that around questions like abortion,

For example,

Or other kinds of questions.

And certainly the division between,

Say,

The Make America Great Again wing of the Republican Party and the rest of society is that kind of gulf right now,

Where perceptions are so different about what's right and fair that we're almost at the same brink we were at the Civil War.

And people don't talk about Civil War like we had in the 1860s,

We have large armies amassed at each other's borders.

But it's certainly an era where there'll be guerrilla actions and lone wolf actions and terrorist actions going on.

And the question is,

How do you deal with these kinds of terrible divides?

I mean,

Our goal is to avoid these kind of conflicts as much as possible.

But that as much as possible has an asterisk next to it,

Which is that things aren't always possible.

And when is the resort to force actually okay?

So I think that's another very,

Very live question that's one we always have to be inquiring into.

We'd like to keep the peace.

I think for me,

The most immediate answer to that is that we have to have the ability to see each other as people,

Regardless of our differences,

And realize that people have in many ways more in common than they have difference.

So that for example,

The very right wing Republicans I know,

May also be very good at raising their kids and educating them and earning their living and they might be honest in their business affairs and so forth.

And that it doesn't make you corrupt human being all around,

To just disagree on a whole variety of important political points.

We probably all have common ideas about what it means to be a good neighbor.

In other words,

If your neighbor is sick,

Help them get to the doctor or don't play your music too loud at night.

We all have some common understandings of things,

Even though we disagree about gun ownership and abortion and how to deal with transsexuality and homosexuality and what role should women have.

We disagree on very important issues.

And we also understand that if we let people just,

If we let someone in another state run things that they want to,

If we let Mississippi be Mississippi,

So to speak,

We also know that we're people we care about in Mississippi,

Because they're kindred spirits of ours in some kind of way,

Who are being harmed by all this in very palpable ways.

And how much of that do you tolerate?

And how much of that you just say,

Well,

It can't be helped.

So I think these are very live questions for all of us.

And I'm not giving any answers to them.

I'm just saying,

This is what we live with right now.

And we have to keep on,

We have to keep on inquiring,

We have to keep on trying our best to talk with other people and not to them.

Okay,

I think one of the most valuable things I learned as I was on this journey of writing this book was the idea that our job is not to change other people's minds about their values.

But first of all,

To explain to them that we hear what their concerns are,

We understand why they think the way they do.

And if we don't,

We ought to make the effort to do that.

And then second,

After we explain to the person why we understand what they do in a way that they can say,

Yes,

You heard me,

Then you can go on and say,

And I'd like to explain to you why I see things differently,

Not why you were wrong and why I'm right.

But let's talk about the fact that we do have different visions.

Isn't that interesting?

And let's explore it together.

That's a very hard thing for people to do because values is what people are invested in the most and don't want to explore.

They're just God given things for a lot of people.

But I think that's the route we have to go is finding a way to talk with each other rather than at each other in some kind of way.

Yeah.

So essentially,

To somebody who has a different set of values,

Embodying the attitude,

I see you,

I want to see you in a way that you experience being seen by me.

And I'd like to have an opportunity to share with you how I feel so you can possibly see me as well.

Right.

And also explain why I see things differently.

Why don't I see things the way you do?

What are my reasons?

How did I get to where I am?

There's a story behind it,

A narrative.

I'm not just sticking to a point,

But I want to understand not just the point,

But the point through your experience.

I want to understand why you believe the way you do.

And I would like you to understand not just my ideas,

But actually how they are,

Why they are important to me and how I.

.

.

That's right.

That's right.

And maybe you'll end up not agreeing with me,

But maybe understanding,

Well,

It's possible to have a different view and still be a decent human being,

Which is a remarkable agreement that it's very hard for us to reach.

And this is really the same thing that a therapist like Marsha Linehan says about how to talk to borderline patients who are cutting themselves.

You don't just say,

Cut it out.

But you say to the person,

I understand why cutting is so important to you and why it seems almost impossible for you to live a life without doing it.

And I also think it'll be impossible for you to have a better life for yourself or a life worth living unless you stop doing it.

But you have to combine both points of view to get anywhere with the patient.