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Growing Up as a Species: Accepting the Worst, Realizing the Best - by Frances Moore Lappé
http://www.humansandnature.org/mind---morality---frances-moore-lapp---response-151.php
Growing Up as a Species: Accepting the Worst, Realizing the Best
Frances Moore Lappé
Cofounder – Small Planet Institute
All of my life’s work has, in a sense, been a journey to help enable mind and morality to meet and, even more, to live and cocreate together—happily.
I was born during the Holocaust and grew up in Texas in the 1950s surrounded by a racist, religiously narrow culture. As a young adult my heart was grabbed by one question: Why does humanity tolerate the cruelty of hunger in a world of plenty?
Over decades of asking “why” and “why” again, I’ve come to define the core challenge that humanity has yet to meet: it is to understand that we can evolve as “moral” societies—by this I mean life-serving—only as we accept the good, the bad, and the ugly in our own nature, in every person’s nature! To this end, we can put our minds to work on the moral task of creating those identifiable, specific conditions that have proven over our lengthy social evolution to bring forth the best in our species and to keep the worst in check. I think of this primary task as “growing up as a species.”
For most of us, embracing such complexity in our nature is difficult because a very different framing of social progress—the “good guys” defeating the “bad guys”—is entrenched in the worldviews that most cultures propagate. A variant of this dichotomous perspective is the notion of the good inside us defeating the evil inside us
<snip>
Growing Up as a Species: Accepting the Worst, Realizing the Best
Frances Moore Lappé
Cofounder – Small Planet Institute
All of my life’s work has, in a sense, been a journey to help enable mind and morality to meet and, even more, to live and cocreate together—happily.
I was born during the Holocaust and grew up in Texas in the 1950s surrounded by a racist, religiously narrow culture. As a young adult my heart was grabbed by one question: Why does humanity tolerate the cruelty of hunger in a world of plenty?
Over decades of asking “why” and “why” again, I’ve come to define the core challenge that humanity has yet to meet: it is to understand that we can evolve as “moral” societies—by this I mean life-serving—only as we accept the good, the bad, and the ugly in our own nature, in every person’s nature! To this end, we can put our minds to work on the moral task of creating those identifiable, specific conditions that have proven over our lengthy social evolution to bring forth the best in our species and to keep the worst in check. I think of this primary task as “growing up as a species.”
For most of us, embracing such complexity in our nature is difficult because a very different framing of social progress—the “good guys” defeating the “bad guys”—is entrenched in the worldviews that most cultures propagate. A variant of this dichotomous perspective is the notion of the good inside us defeating the evil inside us
<snip>
Via
http://smallplanet.org/newsroom/mind-and-morality-where-do-they-meet
Mind and Morality: Where do they meet?
June 15, 2015
The Center for Humans & Nature has just published a frame-shifting essay by Small Planet Institute cofounder Frances Moore Lappé. “I’ve finally gotten my worldview down to 1,000 words!” says Frances. She argues that the breakthrough for humanity, lies in accepting all aspects of our nature; then basing our social rules on hard evidence about what brings out the best and the worst in our species. The great news, she stresses, is that we don’t have to change human nature to build the world we want.
<snip>
Mind and Morality: Where do they meet?
June 15, 2015
The Center for Humans & Nature has just published a frame-shifting essay by Small Planet Institute cofounder Frances Moore Lappé. “I’ve finally gotten my worldview down to 1,000 words!” says Frances. She argues that the breakthrough for humanity, lies in accepting all aspects of our nature; then basing our social rules on hard evidence about what brings out the best and the worst in our species. The great news, she stresses, is that we don’t have to change human nature to build the world we want.
<snip>