Straws in the Wind

            Several minor incidents in the last couple of weeks have gotten me thinking about the ways of the world.  Not that I want to go all Andy Rooney on you, but sometimes you do just have to ask if anybody’s noticed.

Example 1:

A mile or so from my home there’s a little square that sits on the edge of the Boston town line.  Not much there: a Dunkin’ Donuts (this is Massachusetts after all), a liquor store, pizzeria, gas station, neighborhood bar, and tiny, imperiled post office with friendly staff and no lines.  One of its roads passes under a commuter rail line, and sitting above the embankment for the trains is a billboard, which mixes ads and public service announcements every few weeks or so.
            This week, however, it sports the most distressing PSA I’ve ever seen.  Next to a photo of a young black boy are these words in giant letters:
                                                     MURDER   
                           IT'S NOT OKAY
My first impulse was to say “I knew that.”  Then I began to wonder who doesn’t? And in our age of hyperbole, who decided to take this understated approach?
            There are, I believe, a number of “It’s Not Okay” campaigns, or similar, around.  I’ve seen the “It’s Not Acceptable” campaign about name-calling, with Jane Lynch and Lauren Potter, and I find it very impressive.  But “It’s Not Acceptable” seems like a tougher stance than “It’s Not Okay.”  The latter sounds rather playground or parent-child to me: It’s not okay to take the last cookie, leave someone out of the game when choosing sides, or bite your older brother.  But is murder now just “not okay”?  Isn’t not being okay part of the definition of murder, as opposed to say justifiable homicide, self-defense, or a few other types of death-dealing that have at one or another time, in one or another place, been socially sanctioned.
            We do live in the age of water-boarding, drone strikes, and stand your ground laws, but none of these seem exactly relevant to this ad, which almost undermines itself.  After all, I do a fair number of “not okay” things from time to time: slide through a yellow light at the last minute, feed the parking meter, say I’ve only had two glasses of wine when I’ve really had three.  Those are not okay.  But murder?  That’s forbidden by all the laws of God and man, in every religion I know of, and with the strictest of penalties for murderers of almost any crime on the books.  What young person with a grudge (because that’s certainly what the image suggests to me) will be dissuaded from a drive-by shooting by a sign at the intersection telling him “It’s Not Okay”?  As far as I'm concerned, this billboard is not okay.
Example 2 (a and b) :
            I’m taking classes, as I’ve mentioned before, in conflict resolution.  Most of my classmates are young enough to be my grandchildren, and in general I am impressed with their commitment to make the world a better place, and with the work many of them are already doing toward that end.  I certainly never did as much as they have when I was their age; working in the State House, volunteering as mediators, or even working their way through school while carrying full-time jobs.
            But every once in a while, one of them says something that makes me realize how differently we see the world.
            Two of these happened recently in my Theory of Conflict class.  In one case, we were discussing a famous 1949-54 study called “The Robbers Cave,” in which a group of social psychologists took two groups of kids to a summer camp.  Each group didn’t know the other existed until they were brought together and urged to compete for prizes.  They became antagonistic and aggressive toward each other, but when the adults arranged “real” challenges that could only be solve by their working together, the rivalries diminished and cooperation increased.
            An interesting study, to be sure.  But I raised my hand to suggest that extrapolating from 11- and 12-year-old behavior to fundamentals of group behavior was rather dubious, especially given the intervening fifty years of research on brain development and its impact on judgement.  Another student responded that maybe these kids were closer to “real human nature” than adults would be.
            “Real human nature”? I wondered. Did he mean literally that the underdeveloped young of a species are more true to the type than the adults?  Or that aggression and conflict are what he thinks of as human nature, and everything else is a veneer covering the brutish and nasty reality of our biology?  The long arm of Social Darwinism, and Freud’s rampaging ids still stretch into the twenty-first century.  Is the impulse to resolve conflict peacefully that motivates students in our program “against nature”?  If so, are we doomed to fight a losing battle?
            There’s a lot of recent research that challenges the “red in tooth and claw” image of human, and general mammalian, nature. The discovery of bonobo culture, evidence that being social and helpful may be a better survival strategy than dominance among the great apes (Alan Alda does better than Arnold Schwarzenegger is the way one wag put it), and studies showing that chimps, and even rats, will refuse to take a reward that costs a peer suffering, are among many that suggest cooperation, altruism, and group solidarity may be as well-founded in our makeup as survival of the individually fittest.
            That’s example two(a).  Two(b) comes from the same class.  In a small group discussion, five or us were asked to design ways of calming tension in a multicultural community dealing with economic struggles and racial tension.  When someone suggested using the churches of the various ethnic groups to connect young people around projects, one student said “That never works.”  She went on to say that she hated religion, and asserted that “You should do what’s right because it’s right, not because someone in an old book said it’s right.”  (She also mentioned that she was upset that the school did not have an atheist alliance.  But hold that.)
            An interesting view.  But how do you know what’s right?  Because you have reasoned to a “right” that eluded all the people before you – the ones who wrote or set down the books?  Because you met someone who persuaded you of their vision of what’s right?  Or because you just knew, from birth, or from some other moment of insight, what was right?  Given a choice between those who listen to a long tradition of wisdom and analysis of right and wrong, or someone who just “got it” between birth and today, whether from solo ratiocination, sitting at the feet of a master, or the promptings of their own heart, I think I’d feel safest with the first.  To go back to our beginning, would I rather be surrounded by people who had heard “Thou shalt not kill” from the time they could understand the words, people who had worked out the sanctity of human life all by themselves, or people who need a poster in Hyde Park to tell them “Murder: It’s Not Okay”?  Tell me what you think.