It's difficult to define morality, or for that matter, to define any other characteristic that most people would agree is part of being a decent human being. But that shouldn't stop us from speaking about morality, since common sense and intuition are a pretty good guide here.
In the February 2025 issue of Scientific American, there's an article about how the adolescent mind develops, "Growing the Adolescent Mind."
The geeky details are interesting. However, what caught my eye was the mention of transcendence, which I usually think of as referring to something in the religious or spiritual sphere. After all, TM is shorthand for Transcendental Meditation, which has been popular since it started being taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 1950s.
The psychologist who wrote the Scientific American story, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, says that transcendent thinking takes us beyond the here and now.
This emerging capacity to muse in abstract ways enables teenagers to understand themselves, their family, friends and society at large and to imagine what their own place in the world might be. Over time such transcendent thinking constructs resilience to adversity and places young people on a path to future satisfaction with life, work, and relationships.
No matter what age we are, being able to look beyond the narrow confines of Me is key to a mature vision of reality. The more we can expand our circle of caring, the greater our morality will be. Sure, it is natural to care most deeply about the people closest to us, family, friends, co-workers, and such.
Knowing them intimately enables us to recognize their joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, hopes and fears. Empathy is fairly easy to come by when we feel like we know someone's interior life in addition to their exterior appearance and doings.
Yet we also can empathize with strangers, people we've never had any contact with and likely never will. For they share our basic humanity, no matter how their nationality, religion, political leaning, or any other characteristic differs from ours.
And why stop with humans? Animals also deserve our empathy. This is the main reason I became a vegetarian about 55 years ago. I knew that I'd be upset (to put it mildly) if someone killed me in order to eat my flesh. So I empathized with the animals that often die cruel deaths to become a human meal.
In the book I wrote for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Life is Fair, which presented the karmic rationale for vegetarianism, a quote from Albert Einstein was included:
A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited by time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separate from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This consciousness is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few people closest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
There are many reasons why I dislike Donald Trump. I readily admit that I have a lot of difficulty mustering up much compassion or empathy for him.
Still, when my wife watched The Apprentice, a movie about Trump, I did feel some empathy, as it was clear that his father didn't shower him with love and his relationship with Roy Cohn, a jerk of an attorney who schooled Trump in how to manipulate people for his own ends, seemed to be a second-chance attempt with a father figure.
(My parents divorced when I was very young, and I only spent one hour with my father, so I understand the pain of not having what so many people take for granted.)
What bothers me the most about Trump -- even though I realize this isn't under his control -- is how he demonstrates such little compassion and empathy. Every relationship is transactional for him. He always wants to know what's in it for him, not what is best for the other person (or group, or nation).
Not once have I seen Trump show that he deeply cares about the suffering of others. I've never seen him shed a tear for those less fortunate than he is. Yesterday I wrote a post for my Salem Political Snark blog, "A USAID worker I know died helping others. Trump is trashing his memory."
In the post I shared some of the wonderful things that the United States Agency for International Development does for people around the world. Sure, this agency isn't perfect. No government agency is, just as no person is. I wouldn't mind if Trump set out to fix the things that are wrong with USAID, leaving its core humanitarian mission intact.
But Trump is taking a wrecking ball to USAID. His America First policy is the political equivalent of a Me-Me-Me narcissist who only wants to see their own reflection in a mirror. In my blog post I shared an excerpt from a New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof.
I’ve seen genuine improvements in U.S.A.I.D. over the years. Its public-private partnership to tackle lead poisoning, announced last year, was a model of American leadership. And so from my travels, this is what U.S.A.I.D. has come to mean to me:
I’ve seen women and girls with obstetric fistula, a horrific childbirth injury, get a $600 surgery that gives them back their lives — and this is something that U.S.A.I.D. supports.
I’ve seen men humiliated by elephantiasis and grotesquely enlarged scrotums, occasionally requiring a wheelbarrow to support their organs as they walk. And U.S.A.I.D. has fought this disease and made it less common.
I’ve seen children dying of malaria (and I’ve had malaria), and I’ve seen U.S.A.I.D. help achieve major strides against the disease over the last two decades.
I’ve seen southern Africa ravaged by AIDS. And then President George W. Bush’s landmark program against AIDS, called PEPFAR and implemented in part through U.S.A.I.D., transformed the landscape. I saw coffin makers in Lesotho and Malawi grumble that their business was collapsing because far fewer people were dying. PEPFAR has saved 26 million lives so far. (In the coming months, I’ll see if I can calculate how many lives are lost to Trump’s cuts in aid.)
I’ve seen the suffering of communities where people in middle age routinely go blind from trachoma, river blindness or cataracts — and the transformation when U.S.A.I.D. helps prevent such blindness.
Trump scoffed that U.S.A.I.D. was “run by radical lunatics.” Is it radical lunacy to try to save children’s lives? To promote literacy for girls? To fight blindness?
If this is woke, what about the evangelical Christians in International Justice Mission, which, with U.S.A.I.D. support, has done outstanding work battling sex trafficking of children in Cambodia and the Philippines? Does Trump believe that rescuing children from rape is a radical lunatic cause?
Trump’s moves are of uncertain legality, not least because U.S.A.I.D. was established by Congress, but the outcomes are indisputable. Around the world children are already missing health care and food because of the assault on the agency that Kennedy founded to uphold our values and protect our interests.
To billionaires in the White House, it may seem like a game. But to anyone with a heart, it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.
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