The Answer is Love

The world (mostly the United States, but also elsewhere, or so I've heard) is going through a rough time right now. I both do and don't want to blog about it, so I'll let it suffice to say that the world could use a lot more love. People should love each other enough to not hurt each other. People should love each other enough to forgive those who have hurt them. People should spread love instead of hate.

And that includes me.

I hate what's going on right now for multiple reasons, but I shouldn't focus on that. I should focus on love. I love that I live in a free nation where people can, for the most part, speak their minds and share their thoughts freely. I love that there are many good people in the world who are trying to help fix our problems. I love that I can reasonably have hope that things will eventually get better.

But mostly, I love people, and I try to love all people, regardless of who they are or where they come from, regardless of what they look like or what they've done. Every human being who has ever lived or will ever live is a son or daughter of God. We're all family, and I think we should all try to love each other like family.

Anyhow, that's my two cents about it. I could go into greater detail, but I don't want to, and frankly, I'm probably not qualified to talk about it. I'll leave it to the experts and those with personal experience. I just want to share my opinion that, with this problem, as with most (if not all) others, the answer is love. We don't need more hate. We don't need more violence. We need more love.

Murder Motivated by Love

I just killed a spider. I probably didn't have to. I could have caught it, let it loose outside, and let it live. If I had been the one who found it, that's probably what I would have done. But I didn't. I killed the spider, even though I didn't have to. Essentially, I murdered the spider.

Yet, I killed the spider out of love, not for the spider, but for my sister. She was the one who found the spider. She fears and/or hates spiders (I'm not sure which term she prefers), so I made certain that that particular spider could never bother her, or anyone else, ever again.

Is it wrong to kill a living creature when you don't have to? Almost certainly. Is it good to act in accordance to one's brotherly love of one's family? Also yes. So, then, what am I to make of my decision to kill a creature for my sister's sake? I don't know.

Thankfully, that act was probably not significant enough to matter much, in the grand scheme of things. Still, I'm glad I'm not the one who needs to judge my actions. I have no idea how to adjudicate the proper reward or punishment for someone who kills a spider as motivated by brotherly love.

Motivated by Love

I help others. My job, as a writing tutor, is to help my fellow students become better writers. My job as a son and a brother is to help my family. My callings in the church (back before quarantine when we actually attended church) can be imaginatively interpreted as helping others in various ways, either by helping them learn the gospel or by helping them organize the work of keeping the church building clean.

I help others largely out of a sense of obligation. It is my moral obligation to accept and fulfill church callings. It's my familial obligation to serve my family. And it's my vocational obligation to work at the Writing Center. I do these things partly because I have to, or at least because I'm supposed to. Yet, I hope that that isn't my only motivation. I hope that I help others at least partly out of love for those whom I'm obligated to help.

I hope that my actions are at least partially motivated by love. I should help people because I want to help them, not just because it's my job as a family member, church member, or writing tutor. I should help people just for the joy of helping them, and not just to feel the sensation of joy. I should help people because I love them enough to want to help them, whether I get anything out of helping them or not.

I don't know if I'm fully there yet. Yes, I love my family, and the opportunity to help people is the main reason I love my job, but I feel like I could do better to be motivated by love in my church callings and in my day-to-day life. In theory, almost all our actions should be motivated by love, either for God or for His children, or both. Fortunately, I'm sure that some of my actions are motivated by love, but I don't think that all of them are. Something to work on, I guess.

I'm glad to know that some, perhaps many, of my actions are partially, though not entirely, motivated by love. I think that true love is one of the purest and strongest motivations one can have. Love can motivate us to do great things for God and for other people. It's not necessarily wrong to be motivated partly by money or by a sense of duty, but I think it's better to be motivated mostly, if not entirely, by love.

Love Month

According to the LGBT community, June is Pride Month. In my community, however, the word "pride" has a negative connotation. Pride is associated with negative personality traits, such as self-centeredness and egomania. A proud person is arrogant, boastful, and full of themselves. I believe that much of our issue with pride stems from President Ezra Taft Benson's well-known talk, Beware of Pride. In it, he spoke against pride in some of the strongest language I've ever heard a prophet use: "Pride is the universal sin, the great vice." And he repeated it for emphasis: "Yes, pride is the universal sin, the great vice."

Yet, I know personally that not all members of the LGBT community are guilty of the sin of pride. That's why I prefer not to think of June as "Pride Month." Instead, I'd rather think of June as "Love Month."

While we see pride as "the universal sin, the great vice," we see love as the central element of the first two great commandments and the first great truth of all eternity. Love is a good thing. Love is open and welcoming. Love is kind.

And, importantly, love does not need to be romantic, let alone sexual. The Greeks have several words for love, and "eros" is only one of them. The many types and expressions of love also include brotherly love, familial love, the love we have for God, the love God has for us, and love toward all mankind. Love can be platonic, and we should have that kind of love toward everyone, and we should appreciate that people of the same gender can have that kind of love for each other.

So, this month and always, let's try to show love for each other and for everyone, even with the people with whom we disagree. We may not approve of all of their actions, but we can still love them, and we can appreciate all that is good in the love they have for each other. Let us not pridefully say that our way of life is better than theirs, that our expressions of love are purer than theirs, or that we are bound for heaven while they are bound for hell. It's not our place to judge. Instead, let us love them with the same kind of love God has for us. God wants us to love each other. So, this month and always, let's let go of our pride and instead show our love.

Practicing Kindness Toward Wrongdoers?

In response to last night's blog post, a friend of mine, Carole Tiefenbach said that she generally doesn't have any trouble being kind to rocks, plants, and kind animals, but that she sometimes struggles to be kind toward evil people and toward the crows and grackles that eat her baby birds and robin eggs. That got me thinking, should we show kindness to those who do bad things, and what form should that kindness take?

I know that we should always try to love others, regardless of what they do, but love and kindness are not always the same thing. Love is sometimes expressed in the form of correction. Our love and concern for others sometimes requires us to steer them toward the right path. When appropriate, this sometimes requires some punishment, but while punishment can conceivably be loving, it would be a stretch to call it "kind." Are there situations where it's important not to be kind?

I puzzled about this topic off and on all day, and the answer that I eventually came to is that, while one can never be too loving, there are situations where it would be wrong to be too kind. This idea hearkens back to Aristotle's Virtue Theory of Ethics. According to Aristotle, (almost?) any virtue, if taken to an extreme, can become a vice. For example, humility is a virtue, but too much humility can lead to self-abasement and self-esteem issues. Too much humility can cause a person to not evaluate themselves fairly and can be emotionally harmful. Similarly, too much kindness can prevent much-needed correction. On the occasions where punishment is necessary, too much kindness can hold someone back from getting the help that they need.

Exercising too much kindness can also be dangerous. If a person is acting violently and threatening innocents, it's our responsibility to do everything we can to prevent or end that violence and to protect the innocent, even when that means that we need to be violently unkind.

So, confusingly, it is theoretically possible to be too kind to someone. However, this is fortunately not a situation we often run into. Meting out punishment is not often our job. It's true that someone on a position of authority sometimes has to correct someone else's behavior, but that doesn't apply to all of us, and even for those of us who do have to exercise authority, that doesn't always require dealing out punishments. Often, we can afford to be as kind as we can manage. And even when kindness isn't entirely appropriate, we can still act out of love.

It is rare for the average person to have to punish someone else, and it's rare for violence to be the correct solution to any problem other than violence. Since we don't often have to face violence or enact punishment, we don't often find ourselves in situations where we have to worry about being too kind. In general, being too kind is impossible. Still, I suppose it's worth knowing that, under certain, rare circumstance, it's possible to be a little too kind.

Practicing Kindness

In talking with my sister tonight, we discussed the importance of practicing kindness, no matter who or what that kindness is being directed at. There are several good reasons to be kind, such as to respect the feelings of others, but even in the cases where some of those reasons may not apply, such as with inanimate objects, there is still one good reason to practice kindness, and that's it: to practice kindness.

Practice is important. If you want to get better at playing the piano, you need to practice. If you want to learn to tell better stories, you need to practice. If you want to become a kinder person, it stands to reason that you might need to practice.

That's why it's important to practice kindness, even on things that may not be able to experience your kindness, like plants or rocks. They may or may not be conscious enough to be able to tell the difference between kind and unkind treatment, but we should be. We should practice kindness, even towards rocks, if for no other reason than to help us learn to consistently be kind.

It's important to be kind to people. It's almost certainly important to be kind to animals. It's probably important to be kind to plants. And it may even be important to be kind to inanimate objects, like rocks. But whether or not the rocks, plants, and animals deserve moral consideration, we should give strong consideration to our moral behavior, regardless of our circumstances. Kindness is a virtue, and we should strive to develop it, regardless of on whom or on what we are practicing kindness.

Am I suggesting that we should try to be kind to rocks? Yes, I am. Not necessarily for the rocks' sake, but for ours. I don't know whether the rocks care if we're kind or not, but regardless, it is always important to be kind.

Addiction, Agency, and the Locus of Control

One of the YouTube videos I've seen recently, titled The Science of Learned Helplessness, reminded me of something I've been thinking about for a while now. When we talk about addiction, we sometimes talk about how it erodes one's agency. Just as with the Positive Feedback Loops and Spiritual Inertia, the idea is that every time a person makes a decision that feeds into their addiction, that decision becomes easier to make the next time, which makes the decision even easier to make the time after that, and so on. There's also some talk about brain chemistry and neuropathways, but I don't know a whole lot about that, so I can't really comment on it. What I can say is that, whether this belief is true or not, believing that an addiction weakens one's agency can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a person starts to believe that they don't have a choice, they can hardly be expected to make the right choice. One cannot be expected to exercise their agency when they believe they have, to some extent, lost that agency.

In the video, The Science of Learned Helplessness, video essayist Travis Gilbert spoke about a concept called the locus of control. To summarize and paraphrase, having an internal locus of control means that you believe that control over your life rests primarily inside you, whereas having an external locus of control means that you believe that your life is basically outside of your control. An internal locus of control fosters self-determination, whereas an external locus of control contributes to a phenomenon called learned helplessness. Gilbert gives the example of an adult elephant tethered by a small rope or a thin chain. Even though the elephant could easily break the restraint, it doesn't even try because it was secured with a stronger restraint when it, the elephant, was younger and much weaker. As a calf, the elephant became convinced that there was no way to break that chain, so even when it grew bigger and stronger, it didn't even try. The elephant had learned helplessness, and so do we.

We learn that addictions are dangerous and powerful, and maybe they are, but we learn that they are difficult to escape, which may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people believe that their addiction is outside of their control, they may not be motivated to do much to escape them. After all, why would they? It's out of their hands. Even relying on God is a bit risky, since people can learn to rely on God too much, passing the responsibility to God rather than taking responsibility for themselves. They place their locus of control outside of themselves, hoping to absolve themselves of any wrongdoing.

And granted, there are cases where people truly can't control their actions, including some true addictions, with the brain chemistry and neuropathways. But in most cases, I'd say that it's better for a person to believe that they're in control of their own actions so they're more likely to take control of and responsibility for their actions. Just as believing in one's powerlessness can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, so can believing in one's strength. Someone once said "whether you think you can or you can't, you're right." That may not be a universal truth, but it might be wise for people to act like they believed it. We do better at making choices when we acknowledge that we have the power to make choices, a power which, incidentally, I don't think Satan can fully take away. I believe that people almost always have their agency, even in the face of addiction, and that they should never give up their internal locus of control.