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By Dr. Renée Fuller
“My dog Poodie would never have done something as mean as that!” was Elsie’s indignant response to Dora’s sneak attack on Elsie’s friend Patsy.
Dora, angry at being considered the inferior in a comparison with Elsie’s dog, bitterly complained to her mother. Early next morning Dora’s mother hightailed it to the school and indignantly demanded of Miss Elliott, the fifth grade teacher, “What are you going to do about this? Elsie said my daughter is a dog.”
Miss Elliott, a young teacher, realizing she needed help escorted Dora’s angry mother to the principal’s office. After some investigation, the principal, Mrs. Sanders, putting her arm around the angry mother laughingly said: “Seems like it was worse than you thought. The comparison of Poodie the dog and your daughter was not as favorable as your daughter's description implied. To the contrary: the implication was that Poodie, the dog, was the superior because he would never have stooped to a sneak attack that left Patsy with some nasty bruises. Children sometimes have interesting ways of expressing and teaching each other the importance of true morality. Wouldn’t you say?”
Principal’s Sanders’ affectionate and amused treatment succeeded in eliciting embarrassment from Dora’s mother about her unfounded indignation. After several moments of confusion, she reluctantly joined in the principal’s amused laughter. Then almost under her breath: “Wait until I get hold of that kid for lying to me like that.”
The principal’s voice was soothing as she said: “Maybe rather than getting angry with Dora, what might work best would be to explain to her that sneak attacks have a price, as does lying. And that that price may be something as simple and important as loss of trust and being disliked. Elsie telling Dora that Poodie, the dog, was the better person is a polite indication of the cost of Dora’s sneak attack.” Then, her voice softening further Mrs. Sanders continued: “Perhaps this incident will help Dora understand that ‘doing unto others as you would have them do unto you’ makes a lot of sense.”
When Principal Sanders told me about the incident she laughingly said, “Producing that Biblical quote in a school setting is so unlike me. Never mind that the quote certainly fits the case. But when I wondered what had made me produce it I remembered that Dora’s family is known to be exceedingly emphatic about enforcing their religious beliefs. I guess in the back of my mind I was thinking that Dora’s mother would benefit from being reminded that her beliefs include ‘doing unto others as you would have them do unto you,’ which should preclude her from being so punitive with her daughter.”
Did principal Sanders wonder to what extent Dora’s punitive home life had inadvertently motivated sneak attacks, albeit implicitly? Since Mrs. Sanders was an experienced principal with a good understanding of children’s minds, the answer was “in all likelihood.” However, for that very reason she saw her role, and that of the school, as having the function of encouraging children’s natural desire for fairness, for justice; encouraging what she had described to Dora’s mother as children “teaching each other the importance of true morality.”
Elsie’s comment of the implied morality of Poodie, the dog, fits well-known field and scientific observations. Dog society, just like human society, could not have survived over the millennia if dogs attacked one another without reasonable provocation. In a number of ways dog behavior is constrained by what we humans often describe as the laws of morality. This raises the question as well as the possibility that our demands for justice, even our cravings for morality, are fundamental if not in all, at least in most of us. Mrs. Sanders raised that possibility when she referred to children “realizing the importance of true morality.”
In dog or wolf society, not adhering to certain laws of behavior threatens the very existence, the survival, of the group. Our human codification of the basic laws of legal behavior has a similar purpose. The importance of the Ten Commandments, aside from their religious implications, rests in part that they represent the realization that there are laws (rules) of behavior that help a society survive and even prosper.
However, the craving for morality can bring with it a negative component. It is the desire to punish moral transgressors, sometimes severely: something with which Dora’s family was all too familiar. Their reasoning? Punishment will prevent future moral transgressions. However, all too often punishment brings with it the dark component of revenge. And with revenge, what had initially been a quest for morality and therefore survival of the group, begins to rip apart. Whereas true morality is a calming emotion, revenge has the excitatory quality of pleasure. Mankind has a history of wars that exemplify this vicious aspect of what on numerous occasions has been excused as asserting the rules of morality. And yet, revenge and hatred are emotional eruptions that our major religions have tried to discourage, even to inhibit, albeit, as the latest world news reminds us, all too frequently with limited and even contrary success.
Elsie’s comment about the superiority of Poodie implied that the dog demonstrates a genuine form of true morality. When Mrs. Sanders, her principal, curious about the choice of Elsie’s response asked how and why she hadn’t responded physically to Dora’s sneak attack - in other words hitting, or ganging up on Dora and pummeling her – Elsie’s answer was an interesting and genuine manifestation of morality without the revenge component.
“What would’ve been the point of that? It would just have made us all mean, and before you’d know it, everyone would’ve been hitting everyone else. And nobody would really know why; though they might kid themselves they knew why.”
Mrs. Sanders comment to me was: “We should be sending children like Elsie to our international conferences to solve disputes. They might be more successful than the poor job our supposed adults have accomplished so far.”
When I met Elsie and Poodie, her dog, sometime thereafter I received a further lesson on an important aspect of moral development. Explaining what had already become her philosophy Elsie explained: “Wanting to be a good person is terribly important. It makes you feel good about yourself. In a way it’s like Poodie wanting to be told he’s a good dog. I guess that makes him feel good about himself.”
Deeply moral and humane as this fifth grader had demonstrated herself to be, she nevertheless was aware of the tragic aspects of today’s world politics. With a concerned face she described how: “Sometimes things go wrong. Kids are told that to be good they must do awful, evil things: like killing other people – even killing themselves. Like doing such terrible things makes them good people.”
In my next meeting with Principal Sanders we talked about how on a personal level “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” would resonate with Elsie. Somewhat regretfully, Mrs. Sanders expressed the wish that it would be politically permissible for her to teach how this Biblical phrase fits into historical perspective: that it would be all right for her to illustrate to the children the importance of that phrase in the development of mankind. And she wished she could tell the story of the ancient rabbi-scholar who two millennia ago was queried by Roman philosophers, “Can you tell us, while standing on one foot, what the Talmud (the Old Testament) is about?” How the rabbi-scholar had responded while standing on one foot with: “The Talmud is about ‘doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ The rest is commentary.” Mrs. Sanders and I agreed that in the two millennia that have followed since the ancient rabbi’s answer, humankind is still a long way off from understanding the importance of living up to this essential moral principle.
Bobbie aged fifteen, and already a history buff, had understood what happens when that essential moral principle is ignored or breached - although he was only vaguely acquainted with its Biblical phraseology. He had come to realize that by abandoning the essential meaning of the admonition it is in fact betrayed. As he described it: “We think of schools as having the job of making good citizens out of kids. But that’s not what always happens. Sometimes things go very wrong. Power hungry dictators use the schools to indoctrinate students to hate people of different races, nationalities, religions or what have you. Much of the time the kids comply. They do what’s expected of them. The politicians make use of the kids like they were a bunch of pawns. Of course the politicians too were kids once. Maybe they were the pawns then. Maybe they still are. There just doesn’t seem to be an end to going off the deep end once this sort of thing gets started. In a funny way special interests (that’s what we call the power seekers nowadays) take advantage of most people wanting to be good people. And if people are told that to be good people they must do awful things, then by golly, they do awful things. History is filled with stories like that. And right now there’s a lot of history: what with all those people blowing themselves up in order to kill other people and then claiming they’re demonstrating they’re good people.”
Like most of his classmates, Bobbie was aware of the violence in much of the world news. But despite that, he shared Elsie’s belief that there is a fundamental craving for morality, a craving that is basic in most of us: even though he, like Elsie, had come to realize how easily that craving can be corrupted. I was curious if Bobbie had thought about what were the distinctive features of true morality and what represented what he had labeled, “Dictators corrupting the desire of children to be good for their own dictatorial power ends.”
So I asked Bobbie: “How can you tell true morality apart from the corruption of it that historically appears so frequently?” I was curious whether Bobbie would produce some version of the Biblical admonition that Principal Sanders wanted to discuss with her charges.
However, Bobbie’s response was, “The difference between the real and the pretense at morality is obvious. How could anyone be confused?” But some moments later and frowning he added: “I guess if it were so obvious the corruption wouldn’t happen so often. And it happens so often in spite of the fact that it usually leads to disaster. The disastrous end should be obvious by now to anyone with just a smattering of historical knowledge.”
My response to that was, “But somehow, despite the millennia of human history with its uncounted corrupt moral disasters it still isn’t obvious. Perhaps something is blocking the realization of what should by now be obvious. There appears to be a fundamental attraction. . .”
Bobbie interrupted me with; “You mean the dancing in the streets deal? I guess maybe there’s a fun payoff that makes people go along with the corruption of real morality”
The videos of people dancing in the street in celebration of the 9/11 attack had given Bobbie a graphic picture that there are people for whom the suffering of others creates pleasure. He was also beginning to understand that the justification for the pleasure created by many of these situations is the claim that the laws of morality had been breached. As he explained it, “The power brokers have accomplished this by corrupting and thereby altering the whole point of morality.”
I have since wondered whether Bobbie is ready for a discussion of the psychological-neurophysiological reasons that explain the ugliness in the evening news. Could this youngster cope with learning about the emotional ramifications and implications that elucidate how and why human violence manages to hide behind avowed morality? At what stage are most of us prepared to recognize and face the reality that adhering to true morality is a calming emotion, whereas altering and corrupting the rules of morality allows for and even encourages a form of thrill-seeking pleasure. In neurophysiological terms, the difference in the feeling tone that accompanies true morality as compared to that accompanying the corrupted form have their emotional representations in different parts of the brain. True morality versus corrupted morality are not merely different semantic categories, they are crucially different neurophysiological and emotional phenomena.
An extreme example of the thrill-seeking would-be morality is and was the killing of a presumed adulterous woman by surrounding her and throwing stones at her until finally killing her. Two millennia ago Jesus faced such a group of in-the-name-of-morality murderous thrill seekers and had them ask themselves if they were free of similar moral failures, which allowed them to judge and punish others. What followed was the memorable scene of the would-be-murderous crowd shuffling off in embarrassment, putting an end to their homicidal thrill-seeking behavior. They had been given conscious awareness of true morality! How very disturbing to read or see on the evening news that identical homicidal scenes are still present with us – most frequently in other parts of the world – sadly, however, without the saving Jesus.
The difference between what Mrs. Sanders had labeled as true morality and punitive morality rests in their difference in emotional affect and therefore not surprisingly in their neurophysiological representation. On an emotional level the distinction between true and punitive morality is exemplified by the revenge component of the latter. Punitive morality makes the claim that it insures morality by punishing moral infractions. Such punishments in some societies can include imprisonment or even death for the wearing of the wrong clothes, for the shaving off one’s beard, etc. Although to our western eyes these appear as extreme examples of punishment, they have been surprisingly frequent in the news of late. Even in our presumably advanced Western world Dora’s family with their severe punishments for Dora’s infractions of minor house rules are examples of how the revenge component continues to infringe on Mrs. Sanders’ true morality.
During afternoon tea recently the principal and I talked about what could be done to help the emotionally unattractive Dora. As a result of her sneaky behavior her classmates now coldly reject Dora. They have even labeled her as “ugly,” which is not literally the case. How could she be helped? Laughingly but sadly Mrs. Sanders and I concluded that: “After two millennia the time has come to follow the ancient rabbi’s example and stand on one foot and proclaim: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’”
About the author:
Dr. Fuller received her M.A. in experimental psychology from Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in 1963 in physiological psychology from New York University.
In addition to developing the Ball-Stick-Bird reading system, and the story-as-the-engram theory of cognitive organization, Dr. Fuller has published widely in the field of clinical physiological psychology. At present she is continuing her work in developing learning programs and writing books and articles about how children learn. She is consultant to numerous school systems, universities, and departments of education, as well as to homeschoolers. Visit her web site: http://www.ballstickbird.com.
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