On Happiness

This week’s reading was fascinating. One thing that really caught my attention is the contemporary relevance of these classical writings. With a good translation it is easy to stop picturing Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in togas and start imagining them in business suits. For the sake of time and space, I will limit my response to the selections from Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” presented by authors Oliver Johnson and Andrews Reath in Ethics; Selections from Classical and Contemporary Writers (2007).

Happiness seems to be an ever more elusive ideal in our society of empty materialism, violence and spiritual crisis. Yet, the United States Constitution is dedicated to the pursuit of it. Happiness is supposed to be what we are all here to achieve. Aristotle wrote on happiness, and I will summarize his main points briefly:

· The purpose of all activity is to try and do good, to obtain happiness, or “human flourishing” (p.61).
· Nobody agrees what happiness actually is (and therefore what good actions are), but for the sake of argument, Aristotle uses “what is obvious or moral” as a measuring stick. He considers three sources of happiness, including pleasurable, contemplative or political actions (p.63).
· Aristotle deals with the tricky matter of whether happiness is an end in itself or a means to good. He asserts that“we must always choose happiness as an end in itself and never for the sake of something else” (p.66) An hour spent with a lover undoubtedly is a happy hour, but if that love is immoral or ill-fated, unhappiness of matched or greater intensity will follow. Happiness must be the end point we aim for.
· The good can only be obtained by actions. Virtues mean nothing in a non-active vegetative state (p.68-69). Simply being good is not enough; one must act out that goodness to flourish.
· Moral virtue is a result of habit (p.72) and we must be taught to feel pleasure and pain at appropriate circumstances (p. 74).
· Aristotle says, “the nature of moral qualities is such that they are destroyed by defect and excess,” and he introduces the idea of the mean, the perfect balance between extremes in emotion or action (p. 73). He claims that being average is virtuous and being extreme is a vice (p. 78-80), although he does admit one has to lean a bit to find the average (p. 82).
· From page 82-83, he reiterates that happiness is not passive, but intrinsically linked to action and engagement, and, assuming that it is a well-trained morally good person, that action would be virtuous.
· Finally, our reading concludes that the contemplative life is the ultimate happiness (p.86).

Aristotle’s argument is so beautifully written and so logically laid out, that it is possible to get swept away in its conclusions without questioning some of his basic assumptions. I will choose to respond to five of these assumptions: 1) goodness is nurture, not nature; 2) it is better to be virtuous by society’s standards; 3) there is a hierarchy of happiness; 4) extremes are vices and the mean is virtue and 5) happiness should be our ultimate goal.

The essence of human nature has been studied by scientists for centuries, and still there is no agreement about the nature of human goodness. Are we born good, or do we become good (or bad), as Aristotle says, through training and habit (p. 72)? Unlike one who sees our natural state as neutral, I sense that the natural state of human beings lies in mixed extremes of feeling and action, good and bad, and that our training counters or reinforces our leanings.

I am uncomfortable with Aristotle’s assumption that it is better to be virtuous when his definition is what society praises or blames (p. 63). In this society, I object to what many would consider virtuous, and my personal value system would not be considered virtuous by some. I don’t use societal norms to define virtue, because as a Christian, my allegiance is not to this society, but to a vision of the Kingdom of God through Christ. In the same vein, I do not believe that virtue always brings happiness and vise versa. Would not our happiness seem sugary sweet without the natural bitterness and sorrow involved in being human? If suffering is necessary (such as Christ’s atonement) for happiness to shine, then according to Aristotle, suffering could also been understood as good.

Aristotle has an unhealthy notion of the hierarchy of happiness when he writes on page 64, “the common run of people and the most vulgar identify [happiness] with pleasure,” while the noble class identify happiness with contemplation and political action. I disagree with making this divide. I think pleasure, including bodily pleasure (associated with women as well as lower classes), should be considered part of the whole of happiness and not a lower subset. We need to learn to overcome the divide that has kept us from a holistic understanding of happiness based on centuries of sexist and classist assumptions.

Finally, I would like to say a word for ecstasy and extremes. What is a life, if it knows nothing but average, nothing but the mean? Are we not created to experience the full range of human emotions and to explore the full range of human experiences? When Aristotle labels the extremes a vice and the average a virtue, he limits human potential (p. 80). Adventures on the edge of the spectrum cause personal growth and can bring a state of ecstasy. In fact, those experiences on the extremes of emotional life are similar to Plato’s description of the Sun outside the cave (p.57).

I don’t know of a case of edge dancing bringing happiness. But here I ask: is happiness indeed the ultimate goal? What about spiritual enlightenment, wisdom, karmic reckoning, or compassionate or heroic actions? Jesus Christ’s suffering on the cross (and that of the Green Man before him) changes the paradigm of happiness as goodness forever. Happiness, apparently, was not a high priority for Jesus, yet he is considered the example of ultimate good by hundreds of millions of people. He could have been in a state of spiritual ecstasy that sustained him through his passion and death, and the reunification with God in the afterlife may be the ultimate experience of human bliss. But the experience of Jesus’s crucifixion can not be considered a “mean” or average of anything!

Examining each of these assumptions helps me question Aristotle’s outlook. Yet, his writing is persuasive. In conclusion, I look forward to a further examination of ethics from different paradigms, and I appreciate a deeper understanding of how the classic Greek and Roman thinkers, especially Aristotle, have formed Western society.


References

Johnson, Oliver, and Reath, Andrews (2007), Ethics; Selections from Classical and Contemporary Writers, Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth

Thoughts on the Bluffton Farmers Market

I was trained in politics, and my husband and I set out after college to do our professional peace movement internships with all the best intentions in the world. Unfortunately we had a very difficult lessons to learn in the adult professional scene and we wound up hurt, disillusioned and bitter, knowing there must be a better way to work and live than what we had witnesses. This experience, as well as the work of Wendell Berry and others led us to a kind of “micro-politics,” our only hope in the ever more overwhelming political struggle that now seemed intimately personal.

We didn’t know anymore how to stop global warming, but we knew what we had to do to cut down our own energy consumption. We stopped using a car and started the process of going off the grid in our home.

We didn’t know how to make peace happen, but we knew what we needed to do to build community. We started getting involved in local projects and our church, planning neighborhood potlucks and started working on building a wide friendship network with everyone from Republicans to those society rejected.

We didn’t know how to stop the sweatshops and unfair labor practices and industrial environmental hazards around the world, but we knew that we wanted to buy things that were made by people we knew. My husband started an all-hand-powered woodworking business, and we tried our best to trade with friends for goods and to minimize the products that we bought.

We didn’t know how to stop the strip mall culture, but we knew that if we couldn’t buy it in Bluffton, we didn’t need it.

We couldn’t stop the TV numbness, but we could promote and organize live, meaningful entertainment for all ages.

This is the mindset that the Bluffton Farmers’ Market was born from and into. A farmers market brought together everything we believed in: local production, environmental stewardship, community sharing and spirit, live entertainment and space for dialogue across boundaries. It even promoted our small town business district and helped to keep Saturday mornings lively at the stores on Main Street.

Here are some things I’ve learned from being part of the farmers market
1) I think it is a very important fact to remember that we failed in the first year that we tried to open the market. Not all good things succeed right away.

2) It seems clear that people want to have their own small businesses, and thrive, given the appropriate venue for creative entrepreneurship.

3) Diverse people are the key to strong networks

4) Non-organization can work very well, depending on your expectations and the energy of the group

Being Integrated

Being Integrated

Describe one of the eight value systems you use most in your work today.
In my life right now I wear many hats. I am the Executive Director of the International College of Integrative Medicine, a Patient Advocate at the Celebration of Health Center, organizer of Mennofolk, a national folk festival network, a Reiki Master and teacher, a wife, mother, musician and friend. Because of these many roles, I will describe my value system as a person and individual, knowing that I bring the same values to each of my vocations.
In my late twenties when I started experiencing Reiki, a form of energy healing, my practitioners would often tell me that they saw a yellow light around my body, sometimes with orange overtones. One explanation for this was that my third chakra (or “Yellow”) was dominant in my thinking and emotional state, and therefore in my energy system. I believe that the Yellow value system fits my current mindset most, and this was confirmed by the instrument Profiling Value Systems which we completed for class this week. I do try to express myself to the best of my ability, which avoiding harm to others. I have strong internal principals which lead me in a quest for knowledge about any situation life gives me. I am adaptable and change easily according to information that I receive, and I value freedom highly, especially the freedom to feel and to do as I feel best.
Did you have a different value system at earlier points in your life? If so, which one?
During my important years of development, through most of my twenties, my primary value system’s color was Green. I had strong, dogmatic beliefs in the power of love to heal, and in the importance of collectivism and cooperation to save the world. In fact, these values were so important to me that I was uninterested in either a career or a job that didn’t promote this beautiful vision of peace and human one-ness. This was a set of values that matched the culture of my birth family and church.
What prompted you to change to a new value system?
Like many young people I ran into a lot of contradictions in what the world is really like. Collectivism became something with frustrating and disappointing results, and I found more energy in developing and acting on my individual inner guidance. Perhaps I became more goal oriented than process oriented. There is not a lot of freedom in a strong social management system, and a longing for freedom awakened in me. In fact, during my earlier thirties I identified with freedom as one of my highest values.
There were some exterior situations involved with my changes. I became a small business activist, associating entrepreneurial freedom with the better world I wanted. Also, I was living in a small town and participating in a close-knit church, where social collectivism was strong. Inner balance required some more individualistic thinking, as well as the necessity to accept co-existing contradictions.
Which of the six conditions for change did you experience?
Of the six conditions (potential, solutions, dissonance, insight, barriers and consolidation) needed for change, I most identify with potential, dissonance and insight in my own transition from Green to Yellow. I believe I was open to change at the time, giving me the potential for change. In fact, I desired change and development within myself. I intuited that dissonance was a condition for change, and I repetitively left my comfort zone during this time of transition, moving with my family for short term jobs in Japan, New York, and Wales, and surrounded myself with complex relationships and projects. All these things were effective growth-producing turbulence. The third condition for change that I experienced was insight. During this transition, I was practicing inner disciplines such as meditation and hypnotherapy. There were times I experienced visions, both guided and spontaneous which gave me insight to my life. These visions helped me to understand why the changes in me were happening and gave me clarity of purpose.
Describe the value systems on either side of your value system. Do you ever draw on these value systems when facing leadership or organizational challenges?
I do draw on of the colors on either side of me during challenges. In the Profiling Values System test, my highest score was Yellow, with Green as a close second, followed by Turquoise and fourthly, Orange. Green is on one side of my Yellow value system, and the Turquoise value system flanks me on the other side of the scale. I find myself drawing from Turquoise when I am influenced by the new age movement, such as in my Reiki work. As a Christian, I sometimes have strong reactions against the relativism of these values and I long for the Green influence of what I see as Christ’s message. However, I feel a stong attraction to the Turquoise way of thinking, and I can reconcile my ideas of Christ’s atonement in Turquoise.
Curiously, it was Orange impulses that helped me to transition from Green to Yellow, and still affect me as I reach toward Turquoise. I also identify with Purple, especially in religious or Reiki contexts when I am dealing with the spirit world. I recognize the layers within me, just as different chakras shine clearly in different contacts, yet the Yellow remains dominant, and I act out of it most comfortably.
Do you see yourself as open, closed or arrested? Provide evidence.
This wide use of different value systems points to an open mindset that is ready for evolution. I hope that I do have openness to change and development in my value systems. I think that I consider change inevitable. Certainly I have recently gone through a lot of turbulence in my life and come out changed by the disruptions. Due to the beta/gamma conditions of my life right now, I am also experiencing some symptoms of a closed state of transition. I have blocked off some of my openness to close friends and my spouse, and I sometimes feel the shell of fear/protection around me. Slowly, as I strive for more security and balance in my life, these conditions are subsiding. I am trying to be open-minded to new hope and meaning in my life, even as I mourn some losses of innocence.
Discuss how your value system gives you guidance when facing a difficult leadership or organizational challenge.
My Yellow value system gives me guidance during this time by allowing me to continue the flow of self-expression, which also allows continued growth and self-knowledge. My Yellow self exudes self-confidence and empowerment while allowing complexity and contradictions in myself and others. This is the key to forgiveness of the past, and a release of fear about the future. I have let go of some ideas about the nature of love, yet I have glimpses of a larger picture in which love may be greater that my original ideal.
If you were to function as a Spiral Wizard in your organization, what would you pay attention to?
I believe that it is no accident that all of the organizations I am involved with seem to match me in a Yellow set of values. I will use ICIM as a case study in being a Spiral Wizard. To transform ICIM into Turquoise would require more focus on a higher consciousness, more spirituality, less materialism and more care for the earth. Unfortunately, ICIM is dealing with a situation of political threat that is keeping us closed to change. Many of our doctors have been persecuted for their alternative medical practices; much of our energy becomes focused on defense and justification. As a Spiral Wizard, my challenge would be to help the organization transcend their political reality and focus inward.
How do you assess the health of the spiral in your organization?
Ultimately, all positions on the spiral are healthy, as long as they are open and moving in growth. Healing from experiences that close us off is a high priority. Being open to using all value systems that fit the situation is also a healthy sign that the spiral is helping us integrate our responses, our development and our current reality.

References
Taken from writings on the ideas of Clare W. Graves.

A Web Networking Proposal for ICIM

Fully Engaging Technology; A Web Networking Proposal for ICIM

As I answer the phone for the International College of Integrative Medicine, I am often asked if we are a college where people come to study. We do not have a physical campus, a consistent student body, or a degree-granting academic program. However, I reply that we are indeed a kind of “college;” we are an association of medical practitioners who come together to learn, teach, and share knowledge in a supportive community. Without bricks and mortar to contain and locate this college, our main portal and hub is our website. This is where the public finds us; this is where our members come to participate. Though we meet in person twice yearly, our email and telecommunications provide the bulk of our interactions. Already we rely on technology to help us associate closely with each other. How can we develop by fully engaged the smorgasbord of technological potential available to us?

To guide my answer, I will use the model of a college campus, echoing Adam Greenfield’s assertion that in the next few years, computers’ “processing power [will be] so distributed throughout the environment that computers per se effectively disappear (p.1). As we envision ICIM’s website home, we need to assume that it will be able to exude the atmosphere and emotional resonance of a college campus, with the logistics of technological information secondary to the natural thought process of a college community.

We have made great strides in building an engaging website over the last two years. To continue that growth, I would like to think about web networking using four themes: Finding, Staying, Participating, and Reaching Out.

Finding

Currently, a Google search for “integrative” medicine does not even bring up our website http://www.icimed.com/. We have been offered the use of a portal to help us register on search engines by Empowered Doctor, an essential first step if we are to take the resource of the web network seriously. As a smaller, but also important step, we are beginning a campaign of asking likeminded groups, our members, and our corporate sponsors and friends to link to our site, consciously building the web of links that will draw search engines our way.

Staying
Once the public finds our site, we can see by our web stats that many spend very little time on it. Currently, the sidebar choices we offer are: Home, Find a Practitioner, Doctor of the Month, Conferences, Corporate Sponsors, Marketplace, Classified Ads, ICIM Forum, ICIM E-Journal, Specialty List, Library, Links, Board, Members Only, and Member Application. Some of these can be developed to be more engaging, interactive, or useful, and more can be added to make our site a memorable destination. In the next year, we intend to add or re-design the homepage, a multi-media page, Politician of the Month,, Library, and Marketplace.

Our campus commons, or homepage could be made beautiful and intriguing, rather than utilitarian in style. Friendly images of doctors taking care of patients could fade from one to another with original music that we sell our our Marketplace page. This kind of welcome is necessary to prepare the way and open the heart for the learning and interaction that is to follow.

We have a wealth of video lectures and radio shows recorded by our members that we must display prominently on our website, making us multi-media. This provides our “campus” with those winding pathways that help us encounter people we might have otherwise missed. Internally, our links to each other will be enhanced, but we can also use this raw material as YouTube data and Empowered Doctor’s medical news story releases, for the benefit of raising the profile of integrative medicine.

A new page of the site is in the works; “Politician of the Month,” where we will encourage and post comments on these profiles of professional politicians who make integrative medicine part of their platform.

Of course, every college needs a library at its center, and our “library” page needs to be expanded to include the full texts of donated books written by members. We need to develop a FAQ page with an automatic range of answers, reflecting the fact that we have diverse opinions on some issues, and giving the basic information about ICIM. As part of our library, we must make our collection of articles, power points and newsletters available to the public in a searchable way.

Some of our members have written books that are for sale on our Marketplace page, and we can quickly expand this section by making automatic links to Amazon.com for these resources rather than typing and scanning all the information ourselves. By becoming an affiliate for Amazon, our organization can get a cut from every book sold that we recommended. We can also include links to movie trailers like Lorenzo’s Oil and The Tomato Effect that portray issues struggle for integrative medicine on an emotional level (don’t forget the fine tradition of a college campus bonding over an art or international film series).

Participating

Making our website a place where people want to linger and stay is an important goal. Allowing the people to participate in the creation of the site can save hours of administrative time as well as add even more valuable data with a prosumer flavor.

Our professor’s “offices” will exist in the form of email and website links to board members and guest speakers we hire for conferences, making them thoroughly accessible for questions from member-students before and after their lectures with us. The word college implies knowledge, that we are an organization that exists to share knowledge about the latest scientific findings in integrative medicine. If our website is a static data base, it will hold much information, but The Social Life of Information reminds us on p. 119 that “first, knowledge (as opposed to information) usually entails a knower.” There are people, teachers behind all that information on the website, and we need to make the human connection tangible to our member/students. It is this engagement that causes learning and breeds knowledge. On a very practical level, it is also this kind of engagement that will keep our members and public coming back to our site and in the long run, keep our group alive.

There are interesting features our webmaster has already built in our campus landscape that are special and hard to find elsewhere. “Find a practitioner” search by zip code is one. Another is a list where members have each defined one of the integrative medical specialties they do. To fully make use of modern technology, members should be able to add or change these definitions at will.

Every campus needs a stadium full of students, and our membership could be more engaged and more easily sustained with an automatic PayPal payment for all yearly fees and conference registrations. I’d like to see an email go out yearly to the physicians, letting them review their membership listing, email me revisions, and pay with the click of a button. We need to find a way to take credit cards or PayPal over the web to make these processes realistic. We need to create templates for online registration for conferences, as well as exhibitor registrations online that are self-serve. Once someone registers, they should be sent a packet of information automatically. This feature could save hours of individual calls and emails asking for clarification of conference information.

Reaching Out

One of the main reasons we have a website is to do outreach. It is time for us to think of outreach as something beyond just our site. It is time for ICIM to become a member of the worldwide web community and begin to participate in the wider forums of web discussion and discovery. College campuses have the same challenge.

Now that we have the ICIM Forum for discussion on our website, we need to make sure we use it! Our board president is the moderator and will be first in line to answer questions that arise. As the Executive Director, I will be monitoring the forum to insure only legitimate sounding students and doctors are posting. Most importantly, we need to recruit medical students to make sure discussions get started and so that others know that the venue is available. One of the best ways to do this is to make sure our forum is linked from the American Medical Student Association, one of the organizations with which we have a good working relationship.

Our webmaster has built the forum so that when someone signs in to leave a comment, they are automatically added to an email list. We use the mass email feature of our website to send out a monthly E-Journal with reminders and links to articles that have commentaries from some of the medical students involved with ICIM. We can now add the extra emails from our forum visitors and have a way to keep in touch with them. Our E-Journals will be listed on the public side of the website, so that they can be browsed by anyone who visits our “campus.” These E-Journals are also meant to be messages to the outside world from ICIM. We need to find ways to widen our audience.

Another important and easy way ICIM could reach out is by putting any videos of our members out on YouTube. We have already started participating in Wikipeadia, with a definition of ourselves. The next step is to appoint several Web Network Research Ambassadors from our website committee to continue expanding our Wikipeadia submissions, purposeful blog sites about our organization, and searching for ideagoras where our research could be put to use and more widely seen.

Conclusion

This vision for the ICIM website may take a while to come to fruition. Most certainly, it is a vision that will constantly change and be adapted as new technology and resources quickly become available. Our current budget for website maintenance is not adequate to include website development, and we need to look at a major expansion of that budget item in later years if the board agrees that our web presence is indeed the essence of where ICIM lives in society. We are expecting approximately $10,000 in corporate sponsor revenue in the next few months, and I propose that we use some of these monies to invest in website development before the year’s end. Our priority is learning, and we can take our cues from institutions of learning, and become a college in more than name only. Beyond bricks and mortar, we have the building blocks of knowledge, dedicated “knoweres” to communicate it, and our website is the best way to make these available to the world.