One Glove and Ten Percent: Spiritual Practice of Generosity, 3

"You can't think and hit at the same time.
- Yogi Berra

For hitting, as for many action, we must rely on habits, so the formation of the habits we'll need is crucial. For that matter, even when there is time for reflection, the way we think is governed by the feelings and values formed as habit.

Consider the story I’ve heard of a woman getting off a subway train. As she readies for climbing the steps into the cold outside air, she reaches into the pockets of her coat for her gloves. She finds only one glove. The other must have fallen out of her pocket. She turns around and looks back into the subway car, and she can see the seat where she had been sitting, and, sure enough, there’s her other glove on the seat. But now the doors are closing. She won’t have time to get back in and retrieve her glove. The glove she has, she throws into the subway onto the seat next to its mate – just as the doors close.

I love that story. One glove isn’t going to do her much good, but somebody else can have the complete pair. That’s the reflex of a person who has cultivated generosity as a deep habit of being, a habit of the heart. It’s the reasonable thing to do, but if you rely on reason, the train will be long gone before you’ve worked it out. Random acts of kindness and senseless beauty flourish as the fruits of disciplined habit-formation that is not at all random or senseless.

"You know she must have lived a long life of generosity, a life of wild and creative generosity of spirit, to be able to think so quickly, to act so urgently and healthily, to know precisely in that moment what would bless the world right then and there. It happened in an instant, but that was planned giving through and through. Something in her past or everything in her past, prepared her for her gesture -- habits of living and giving practiced and refined her whole life long." (Terry Sweetser)

Think in Percents

As a piece of the happy discipline of generous giving, the piece that has to do with giving away our money, it will help to think in terms of percents. This gift comes from you. It is you, so place it in the context of your overall income. Are you giving away twenty percent? Ten percent? Five percent? Decide the percent first – what percent are you going to give away? Maybe this year it can be a higher percent than last year. Then do the math and figure out what dollar amount that comes to. Don’t start by thinking about a dollar amount. Start by thinking about a percent.

I know, questions arise. Percent of gross income or of net income, or what? I recommend using AGI – adjusted gross income – the line at the bottom of the first page of a 1040 form – where certain vital expenses are subtracted, but itemized or standard deductions are not. Adjusted Gross Income is the benchmark used by researchers into giving rates.

Naturally, you'll want to spend a bit more on ice cream than is shown here.

And what percent do you choose to give? The traditional percentage is 10 – that's the standard ten percent "tithe." The Torah, the central part of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the first five books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), set forth law requiring that a tenth of all produce, flocks, and cattle be given to support the Levites, the priestly class in ancient Israel. The Torah also emphasized assistance to foreigners, orphans and widows, those in need, in addition to the tithe of support for the priestly class. The Christian Testament mentions no specific rules about tithing. Jesus is simply clear that we are obligated to be cheerfully generous to those in need.

The tithing rules in the Torah were based on the religious and social system of ancient Israel and on an agricultural economy. The Torah is not authoritative for us. Even it were, it does not address modern-day questions about what percentage we should give, how much to the church and how much to other charities, or whether to base it on gross income, net income, or wealth. Still, I do find there’s something psychologically significant about 10 percent – just move the decimal over one place, and that’s what you give away. If you’re just starting out with generosity practice, giving away 10 percent is a good start. Those who have been at it longer, or are better established in life can think about higher percentages.

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This is part 3 of 4 of "The Spiritual Practice of Generosity"
Click for other parts:
Part 1: Money Makes Mean?
Part 2: Mo Money Blues
Part 4: Give It Away!

Mo Money Blues: Spiritual Practice of Generosity, 2

Timothy Judge (Notre Dame), Beth Livingston (Cornell), and Charlice Hurst (U of W. Ontario) published a study, "Do Nice Guys -- and Gals -- Really Finish Last?" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012 Feb).

“Subjects were asked to assess whether they had a forgiving nature or found fault with others, whether they were trusting, cold, considerate, or cooperative. Then they were given and agreeableness score. Men with the lowest agreeableness earned $42,113 in a given year; those with the highest agreeableness earned $31,259." (Lisa Miller, "The Money-Empathy Gap," New York Magazine, 2012 Jul)

In another study ("The Psychological Consequences of Money," Science, 2006 Nov), researcher Kathleen Vohs merely planted the idea of money in subjects' minds. As the subjects filled out questionnaires, some of them were in a room with Monopoly money present (left over from a prior monopoly game), and some were not.

"Vohs got her result only after the ­subject believed the session was over. Heading for the door, he would bump into a person whose arms were piled ­precariously high with books and office supplies. That person (who worked for Vohs) would drop 27 tiny yellow pencils, like those you get at a mini-golf course. Every subject in the study bent down to pick up the mess. But the money-primed subjects picked up 15 percent fewer pencils than the control group." (Miller)

That’s just from the thought of money planted by having Monopoly money nearby.

Vohs stressed that money-priming did not make her subjects malicious — just uninterested....'I don’t think they mean any harm, but picking up pencils just isn’t their problem.' Over and over, Vohs has found that money can make people anti-social. She primes subjects by seating them near a screen-saver showing currency floating like fish in a tank or asking them to descramble sentences, some of which include words like bill, check, or cash. Then she tests their sensitivity to other people. In her Science article, Vohs showed that money-primed subjects gave less time to a colleague in need of assistance and less money to a hypothetical charity. When asked to pull up a chair so a stranger might join a meeting, money-primed subjects placed the chair at a greater distance from themselves than those in a control group. When asked how they’d prefer to spend their leisure time, money-primed people chose a personal cooking lesson over a ­catered group dinner. Given a choice ­between working collaboratively or alone, they opted to go solo.” (Miller)

There does seem to be a plus side. Thinking about money makes people more oriented to efficiency and productivity – like Bob, the advantaged monopoly player. Money-focus encourages thoughts of self-sufficiency: less willing to help, but also less interested in being helped.

Here's Kathleen Vohs' lecture, "Money Makes People Less Socially Focused":

Research so far hazards no guess as to where the tipping point is after which personality transformation kicks in – and that point is surely highly variable from individual to individual. There is a basic human tendency to protect what we have, and the more we have, the stronger the tendency to put our energy into the having. It requires intentionality to avoid being sucked into that pattern.

Give It Away

A practice of generosity counter-acts that self orientation. Warm-heartedness also reduces blood pressure, anxiety and stress and improves health. You’ve got what you’ve got. Now give it away. Make it into something that connects you to others, that connects you to the world’s suffering. Otherwise, it will be a force of disconnection, tending to makes us less social, less caring. Give it away as a regular practice – weekly if possible.

I never met – and I’d be willing to bet you haven't either – a generous person who was bitter or a bitter person who was generous. That bears remembering. Generosity and bitterness are incompatible.

It’s not entirely clear whether generosity causes reduction in bitterness, or reduction in bitterness causes generosity – just as it isn’t always clear whether wealth causes disagreeableness or disagreeableness facilitates wealth acquisition. Either way, they go together.

Generosity – also known as hospitality, kindnesss, largesse, benevolence, bounteousness, magnanimity, openhandedness, warmheartedness, compassion – life as overflow – enriches our lives. When we live from an awareness of abundance rather than in the grip of the delusion of scarcity, generosity becomes possible.

And generosity grows through practice. To develop in an area requires disciplined commitment. The skilled athletes are not the ones who exercise when they happen to be in the mood for it. The skilled poets or musicians do not just write poetry or rehearse when they feel like it. They show up for daily practice, whether they feel like it or not. Generosity develops in us through a disciplined commitment to develop it as a way of being. “You can’t think and hit at the same time,” said Yogi Berra – meaning that we have to show up for the discipline of training our habit muscles, so that the habit muscles can be our guide when, as in most of what we do in the days of our lives, there isn’t the time or the inclination to think them through very much.

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This is part 2 of 4 of "The Spiritual Practice of Generosity"
Click for other parts:
Part 1: Money Makes Mean?
Part 3: One Glove and Ten Percent,
Part 4: Give It Away!

Money Makes Mean?: Spiritual Practice of Generosity, 1

Money.

If you are unusually self-aware, you might have noticed a very slight feeling of tightening or closing at just the mention of the word. Or maybe, if you're that self-aware, you might have transcended the reactivity that's so common. Research suggests that simply having the idea of money planted in mind has a tendency sometimes to reduce inclinations toward generosity. So I’m taking a risk by talking about money. I’m hoping that knowing about human psychology around money will allow us to decide to override the usual reactivity.

The average income in the world is less than $10,000 a year. Perhaps your household is a little above the world average. Our very wealth itself can make us less generous, if we let it – if we don’t intentionally counter-act the effects of wealth through the practice of generosity.

In one study, experimenters enlisted undergraduates to play monopoly, two players at a time, but with different rules. One randomly selected player started the game with $2,000 of monopoly money, got $200 for passing Go each time, and threw two dice for every move – which, you may recall, is the normal way monopoly is played. Let’s call this player Bob. The other player, let’s call him Bill, started with $1,000, got $100 for passing Go each time, and threw one die for every move.

“The students play for 15 minutes under the watchful eye of two video cameras, while down the hall researchers huddle around a computer screen, later recording the subjects’ every facial twitch and hand gesture.”

What happens?

Initially Bob

"reacted to the inequality between him and his opponent with a series of smirks, an acknowledgment, perhaps of the inherent awkwardness of the situation. 'Hey,' his expression seemed to say, 'This is weird and unfair, but whatever.' Soon, though, as he whizzes around the board, purchasing properties and collecting rent, whatever discomfort he feels seems to dissipate....He balloons in size, spreading his limbs toward the far ends of the table. He smacks his playing piece as makes the circuit – smack, smack, smack – ending his turns with a board-shuddering bang!...As the game nears its finish, [Bob] moves his [piece] faster....He’s all efficiency. He refuses to meet [Bill’s] gaze. His expression is stone cold as he takes the loser’s cash."

Another study

“showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people.”

In one experiment, wealthier people were more likely to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children. If there is such a thing as entitlement culture, it is more often (not always, of course, but more often) the wealthy who feel most entitled. As psychologist Paul Piff concludes,

“While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything, the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, [jerks]....People higher up on the socioeconomic ladder are about three times more likely to cheat than people on the lower rungs.”

The extent to which people with money behave as if the world revolves around them was further illustrated in another study. Paul Piff and this research team

“spent three months hanging out at...a gritty, busy corner with a four-way stop....[They] would stake out the intersection at rush hour, crouching behind a bank of shrubs… and catalog the cars that came by, giving each vehicle a grade from one to five. (Five would be a new-model Mercedes, say, and one would be an old battered Honda....) Then the researchers would observe drivers’ behavior. A third of people who drove grade-five cars, Piff found, rolled into the intersection without first coming to a compete stop....‘Upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles even when controlling for time of day, driver’s perceived sex, and amount of traffic.’"

A similar experiment tested

"drivers’ regard for pedestrians....A researcher would enter a zebra crossing as a car approached it. The results were more staggering....Fully half the grade-five cars cruised right into the crosswalk. ‘It’s like they didn’t even see them,' [said Piff]."

Source: Lisa Miller, "The Money-Empathy Gap," New York Magazine, 2012 Jul.

Paul Piff's TED Talk, "Does Money Make You Mean?"

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This is part 1 of 4 of "The Spiritual Practice of Generosity"
Click for other parts:
Part 2: Mo Money Blues,
Part 3: One Glove and Ten Percent,
Part 4: Give It Away!

See also:
Paul Krugman, "Privilege, Pathology and Power," New York Times, 2016 Jan 1.
Maia Szalavitz, "Wealthy Selfies: How Being Rich Increases Narcissism," Time, 2013 Aug 20.

This Week's Prayer

Dear Great Unknown,

Some theoretical physicists are now suggesting that there was no big bang, no beginning point of time, and that the age of the universe is infinite. We do not know if this is true. Did our universe have a beginning, about 13.8 billion years ago, or is it eternal? Will it reach an end, or go on forever? We do not know.

We have the experiences of our brief flicker of life; white snows of winters, lush verdant summers; we love, and what we have loved passes away from us; we get and we spend; we struggle and we rest; moments of laughter come, and moments of tears -- all of this within a fleeting life within a context of mystery so profound we cannot even say if it began a very, very long time ago, or never had a beginning at all.

Knowledge is power and power is for doing, and when we set aside doing to enter the space of simply being -- of cherishing what is for what it is rather than its usefulness -- then we have entered the way of not knowing, the way of simple openness to what arises without explaining or categorizing; the way of infinite curiosity, ever unfolding; the space of presence; the space of prayer.

Dear Great Unknown, we are unknowing travelers, sometimes far from home. We journey, explore, enjoy, and hurt. We do harm and seek the joy of harming less. This day holds the “bliss of growth, the glory of action, the splendor of beauty.” It also holds terrible pain and loss and death.

May we use what we know for the sake of love and life, understanding that what we know is never final, always provisional, always, dear Great Unknown, within a context of utterly unknowable mystery.

Drawn by Love toward Love (Instead of Guilt, 4)

We humans do love life – not just our own, I mean. We love the abundantly diverse forms of life. We are built to love life. We are drawn to baby faces of any mammal -- we find them universally cute and adorable. Our positive emotional response toward baby mammals across species helps increase the survival rates of all mammals. We keep plants and flowers in and around our homes. (Our love of flowers is probably connected to the fact that most fruits begin as flowers, and it was crucial for our ancestors to detect and remember plants that would later provide food.) Our natural love for life leads us to sustain life.

Researchers are finding that a nurturing relationship with animals is important in early and middle childhood development (Myers and Saunders in Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations, 2002). Richard Louv finds that modern urban living is producing children with “nature-deficit disorder.” Attention disorders, obesity, depression, and dampened creativity, he argues, result from children spending more hours indoors and fewer hours in unstructured, solitary contact with the natural world (Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, 2005).

We are built to love life, to be drawn to it and want diversity of life around us. Through the centuries, however, we have slowly built up ways of life that separate us from it. We twenty-first century humans have grown accustomed to disconnection, and it won’t be easy to reconnect. It will be even harder for our kids.

Julia Whitty reports:

“Children who play unsupervised in the wild before the age of 11 develop strong environmental ethics. Children exposed only to structured hierarchical play in the wild – through, for example, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, or by hunting or fishing alongside supervising adults – do not. To interact humbly with nature we need to be free and undomesticated in it. Otherwise, we succumb to hubris in maturity.” (Mother Jones, "The Thirteenth Tipping Point," 2006)

Unsupervised in the wild before age 11. I had that. When I was 9 we lived next to woods that went on as far as I could walk in a day. There was one time I got lost back there and was pretty scared for a while, but I did find my own way home eventually. I now look back on that experience as an important part of the development of my capacity for awe – full-scale awe that does have a tinge of fear in it – and wonder and ultimately love for the natural habitats of this planet. And I learned I could trust myself in it.

Not many kids today are so lucky. Today, kids simply left alone in a park for a few hours might get the parent arrested (for example, SEE HERE). Wow.

So it’s going to be hard to find ways to connect with the Earth, with nature, with all the variety of life forms on it – harder than it was for previous generations. It’s hard for us to get out into the wildness and abundance of life of natural habitats. Most of us have gradually developed habits that keep us cut off.

Connecting with life – as with exercising; as with eating well; as with going to bed at a sensible hour so we can get enough sleep; as with maintaining a discipline of journaling, spiritual study, and meditation – feels good. It is a joy. But the inertia of habit sometimes prevents us from doing the things that bring us joy.

Drawn by love, toward love, acts of caring for all beings become as natural as a mother caring for her infant. And just as mothering styles differ, we will have different degrees of caring for all life. Which is just fine, as long as, wherever you are, you’re attuned to the world’s invitation to go just a little further -- in love.

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This is part 4 of 4 of "Instead of Guilt"
Click for other parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Following Your Bliss Ain't Easy (Instead of Guilt, 3)

At the end of part 2, The Liberal Pulpit asked:

"Where do you draw the line between the harm you’re willing keep doing and the harm you’ve decided to stop doing?"

Here's where I draw it:

I am a vegetarian. Also, for the last fifteen years, all my clothes – except for socks and underwear – have come from second-hand thrift stores, hand-me downs, and the occasional gift. So I draw the line somewhere north of supporting the environmental degradation of the meat industry and the labor oppression of the textile trade, at least directly.

But I drive a car, fly in airplanes, use some heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, and electric lights all year around. Sometimes I hang my laundry to dry on an indoor clothesline, but sometimes I use the dryer. I eat eggs and dairy, buy foods that are processed, packaged, and imported; and wear shoes that aren’t even tofu.

There’s a lot of harm I’m still doing.

I try to draw the line not where guilt pushes me to, but where it is joyous to do so, where the gladness of simplicity calls. Your discernment about where to draw the line probably yields different results. Following where the spirit’s joy calls. This method is not uniform -- it yields different results for different people -- nor is it easy. "Follow your bliss," Joseph Campbell told us. But following your bliss is a rigorous path and a lot harder than, "Just do any old thing you happen to feel like at the time."

Material things don’t make us happy. We know that. Within six months, at the longest, after even the most exciting material acquisition, a person's overall happiness is back to its baseline level. While we know that material things don't make us happy, it's also true that forcing ourselves to give them up before it feels right to do so won’t make us happy either. Mohandas Gandhi reminds us:

"No sacrifice is worth the name unless it is a joy. Sacrifice and a long face go ill together."

Many religious traditions recognize sacrifice as a spiritual practice. Lent begins on Wednesday, and I do think the Christian tradition of giving something up for lent is a good practice for cultivating spiritual health. Our early ancestors noticed thousands of years ago that, while there is a certain satisfaction in acquiring things, it also, sometimes, feels good to give some of them up.

Other times, the prospect of sacrificing doesn't feel so good -- in which case, as Gandhi cautions us, sacrifice isn't much good as a spiritual practice:

"Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, you should keep it. If you were to give it up in a mood of self-sacrifice or out of a stern sense of duty, you would continue to want it back, and that unsatisfied want would make trouble for you. Only give up a thing when you want some other condition so much that the thing no longer has any attraction for you."

When you want some other condition so much that that the thing no longer has any attraction for you!

Should you, for example, bump that thermostat down from 68 to 67 – or down to 64 during the day and 57 at night? Only if you want some other condition so much that the few extra degrees no longer has any attraction. Only if it feels joyful to be participating just a tiny bit less in climate change and the various harms of fossil fuel use and dependence.

Should you become vegetarian or even vegan? Only if it feels joyful to be participating less in massive cruelty, pain, suffering, and greenhouse-gas production.

Would that feel joyful? Let’s look at how it might.

These steps toward reducing harm will feel joyful insofar as we understand them connecting us with life. Connected to life and this Earth, small acts of care for ecological systems and the sentient beings with whom we share our planet develop our love, expand how loving we are.

Picture someone wearing three sweaters and those mitten-glove-combo things while indoors in their own home -- a single LED lightbulb in the whole house burning, by which they are reading “Household tips from the Amish.” Why would someone do that to themselves if they didn’t have to? They might do it because they understood what they were doing as part of a gentler, more loving relationship with the Earth, and being in that relationship was a source of great joy for them.

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This is part 3 of 4 of "Instead of Guilt"
Click for other parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4

The Harm We Do (Instead of Guilt, 2)

If we eat meat we underwrite tremendous pain and suffering. Millions of cows, pigs, and chickens are subjected to such cruel conditions that killing them is the kindest thing we do. Moreover, the industrial meat production industry produces 18% of greenhouse gases. It’s a larger factor of climate change than the entire transportation sector. If factory farms were out of business tomorrow, we would not, by that move alone, get CO2 back down to the sustainable level of 350 parts-per-million, but it would certainly be a big help.

If we don’t eat meat, but we eat vegetables that weren’t locally grown, or that involved pesticides or inorganic fertilizers, then we contribute to environmental harm – though not as much as eating meat does, since so many more pounds of grain have to be grown to feed to the animal.

If we drive our internal-combustion-engine cars at all, we’re pumping a variety of pollutants into the air in addition to the greenhouse gases, and we’re a part of the political mess that comes from US dependence on oil.

If we use the clothes dryer instead of hanging clothes out to dry, if we run the heat at all in our homes tonight as the temperatures sink below zero Fahrenheit, then, unless we have solar panels enough to have us off the grid, we are cranking that killer CO2 into our atmosphere.

If we do not spend hours carefully researching every single purchase, no matter how minor, then we are almost certainly complicit in unfair labor practices and oppression of workers.

If you ever buy new clothes, you’re supporting a textile and garment industry with a long and continuing tradition of sweatshops and worker exploitation, as well as one that's hard on the environment. Nylon and polyester are made from petrochemicals. Rayon comes from woodpulp, for which old growth forests are cut down and subsistence farmers displaced. Cotton is the most pesticide-intensive crop in the world. Wool subjects some agricultural and craft workers to organophosphate sheep dip. And the bleaching, dyeing and finishing process for both cotton and wool involves polluting waterways.

We – including me – are doing harm all day long. Don’t panic. Breathe. Oh, wait. Even breathing releases CO2 – which is miniscule and would normally be fine because it cycles back into plants through photosynthesis, but there are 7 billion of us now, and lots of carbon that used to be trapped in organisms from millions of years ago is now also in the air from burning the fossil fuel those organisms turned into, so there’s already more carbon than current plant levels can absorb, plus everyday we’re cutting down more of the forests that used to re-absorb carbon, so...

What do we do? Tofu shoes? No. Number 1, let’s do keep breathing. Number 2, let’s don’t give up either. We are always doing harm. But maybe we can do a little bit less. We can move toward doing less harm to the environment and less harm to sentient beings

Here’s where guilt comes in, because guilt is tempting, but it doesn’t help. Guilt is not an effective way to change behavior, tempting as it is. If you are talking to a parent who doesn’t vaccinate her kids, and you try to guilt her by saying such nonvaccination is leading to a measles outbreak, that’s probably not going to change her mind. There’s nothing that will change her mind very quickly. Compassion is your best bet. Compassion paves the way for a possible eventual mind change -- possible, not inevitable; and eventual, not immediate.

That second source of the living tradition we share is "words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love." They don't challenge us to confront wrongdoing with guilt-tripping. They challenge us, rather, to bring justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love. When the harm-doer is ourselves, the best bet for change is to bring compassion and transforming love to ourselves. Instead of guilt, the transforming power of love. Instead of guilt, joy.

Where do you draw the line between the harm you’re willing keep doing and the harm you’ve decided to stop doing? And, more important, what, for you, might be the next step? Wherever it is you now draw that line, the important thing is being engaged in an ongoing process of finding joy in continually redrawing our circle of care larger. Wherever you might be now, what would feel good to you as a next step?

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This is part 2 of 4 of "Instead of Guilt"
Click for other parts: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4