Reflections on a Dialogue between Paul Ekman and the Dalai Lama
by
Mitch Hall
As an advocate of of nonviolence and of raising children without physical punishment, I was struck (no pun intended) by the following, which I am excerpting verbatim from Emotional Awareness: A Conversation between The Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman
(New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2008), pp. 73-74.
I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have. After reproducing the dialogue, I'll add a few more bits of information I gleaned from the book, a few questions, and some speculation.
(DL = Dalai Lama; PE = Paul Ekman)
PE: Let me tell you about a more extreme example. You know how committed I am to my daughter, Eve, whom you have met twice. When she was three years old, she had learned a game to tease me, which was to run out into the street when cars were coming. I would go running after her, grab her, and pull her back!
DL: Hmm.
PE: For her, as a three-year-old, this was enormous fun. Every time, I would say, "Don't run out to the street. You'll get hit!" That is not what she understood. She understood: What a fun way to get Daddy to play with me. So, she would run out again. (Dalai Lama laughs.) The third time she ran out within five minutes, and there were cars coming, without thought, I grabbed her and I slapped her.
DL: Ooo-oo.
PE: The only time in my life I have ever slapped her. It was a violent act. But she never ran out again. Never.
DL: So it is good--it brought out a positive self, yes.
PE: I did not think before I acted.
DL: Oh. Oh.
PE: It was not that I thought, well, now is the time: Use physical force. It just happened. In retrospect, I believe this was compassionate, loving violence.
DL: Yes. That is right.
PE: You agree.
DL: Yes. Totally. So, now, therefore, without consideration of the emotional or motivational level, you cannot judge right or wrong purely on the basis of physical or emotional actions.
Well, that's the excerpt. Do you agree with Ekman's and the Dalai Lama's interpretation of Ekman's slap as "compassionate, loving violence?" If not, how do you see it? I've been pondering the question.
Ekman inadvertently gave disparate clues to another line of possible interpretation, but not in connection with this anecdote. He has stated that people frequently do not know their own motivations or emotions in the moment of arousal. He was himself hit a lot by his own father. He had to run away from home forever at the age of 17 after he had restrained his father to prevent the father from hitting him and warned the father never to hit him again. The father called the police saying Ekman had threatened his life. Ekman said he could not imagine having had worse parents. His mother committed suicide. His father cursed him with the wish that his children would give him as much trouble as he had given to his parents. He went on to become a prestigious psychologist, generally considered the pioneer and world's leading expert on reading emotions from facial expressions. Ekman said that prior to his meeting with the Dalai Lama, when both were in their 70s, he had struggled with an explosive temper that surfaced virtually daily. In the last chapter of the book, he wrote about a personal transformation that led to a less explosive temper. The transformation followed an earlier meeting in which the Dalai Lama had held Ekman's hand while conversing with Ekman's adult daughter Eve, a licensed clinical social worker whose interest in the Dalai Lama had led her father to meet with him.
Is it possible that in a moment of arousal Ekman reacted unconsciously to his daughter with the unthinking physical punishment with which he had been raised? Is it possible he dissociated from or was in denial of his own fear and anger in that moment? Is it possible that Ekman just did not have in his behavioral repertoire, on the basis of his own upbringing, any other way of educating his daughter in that stressful circumstance? Is is possible that both he and the Dalai Lama, who had also talked about some harsh monastic tutors, were idealizing that episode from Ekman's earlier life? We cannot know the answers to any of those questions. Yet it is often most difficult for us to look at ourselves with our most developed understanding. Still, it is reassuring to know of kids who were never hit by a parent for any reason and who learned somehow not to run out into the street.
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From Louise Sundararajan, Ph.D. (Religion), Ed.D. (Psychology)
Dear Mitch,
I really enjoyed your reflections of this dialogue. I agree with your insights into the so-called violence out of compassion. I think that Ekman was either defensive or lacked insight into his own action. Indeed so much violence has been done in the name of love and compassion in human history.
Thanks again,
Louise
_____________________________________________________
From: Roulette Wm. Smith, Ph.D.
To: 'Dr. Louise Sundararajan'
Sent: Saturday, March 27, 2010 2:15 AM
Subject: RE: DIALOGUES--Thoughts on a Dialogue between Paul Ekman and the Dalai Lama
Dear Mitch and Louise,
I am responding to the limited information in your vignettes and have a slightly different perspective on Ekman’s and the Dalai Lama’s dialogue and behaviors. Succinctly, I believe Ekman engaged in an important parental role of teaching Eve “common sense.” That he slapped her perhaps was unfortunate, yet the response was quite appropriate in view of Eve repeatedly running into the street … whether as an act of teasing or naiveté. That Eve’s age was approximately three years old when the incident occurred is particularly noteworthy. This would have been shortly after the “terrible 2s” when children often are defiant and when common sense learning is intense. Perhaps Eve’s behavior was a act in the latter part of her “terrible 2s.”
It also is noteworthy that Ekman did not mention his “explosive temper that surfaced virtually daily.” Indeed, he says of the incident that it was “The only time in my life I have ever slapped her. It was a violent act. But she never ran out again. Never.” To me, this was the defining instance of teaching common sense and Eve acquiring the concept in the specific instance (also see <http://www.kjf.ca/100-TASMI.pdf> and <http://www.teslatech.info/ttmagazine/v6n2/v6n2smith.pdf>). Arguably, the fact that Ekman never slapped Eve again should teach us of a possible need to avoid using the term violence and perhaps use the term punishment or some more neutral term.
My question for Mitch and others: Suppose Ekman did nothing. Might not Eve grow up exhibiting aberrant common sense or possibly disorders in common sense? Have you not known a person lacking elements of common sense? Equally important, is there now a need for some mention of common sense and its disorders in, say, the forthcoming DSM-V and in our clinical and educational textbooks?
Roulette Wm. Smith, Ph.D. – Director
Institute for Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Studies
P. O. Box 60846
Palo Alto, CA 94306-0846 USA
(650) 493-0200 (Voicemail Only)
(650) 248-7645 (Cell)
E-Mail: <najms@postgraduate-interdisciplinary-studies.org>
E-Mail: <najms@humanized-technologies.com>
~ Also ~
1735 East Second Street #E
Long Beach, CA 90802-5921 USA
(562) 951-9505
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In a message dated 2010-03-28 1:30:26 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, breathepeacefully@me.com writes:
by Mitch Hall
Thanks to Professor Roulette Wm. Smith for the thoughtful response to my posting. I welcome and respect the different perspective he provides. This also gives me an opportunity to reflect more about what I sensed from this bit of dialogue between two people whom I regard with much admiration and appreciation for their bountiful gifts to humanity of knowledge, insight, research, and wisdom.
I wish to clarify three points concerning what I was not saying, implying, or even thinking. Firstly, it was not my intention to call into question the necessity of Ekman's taking decisive, parental action so that his young, beloved daughter would learn not to put her life unwittingly at risk ever again by running into the street. Likewise, I never for a moment doubted his abiding love and care for his daughter at all stages of her life. Had it not been for her interest in the Dalai Lama as a spiritual teacher, Ekman may never have overcome his avowed skepticism and agnosticism about spiritual matters. It was fatherly love that led him into dialogue with the Dalai Lama in the first place, as he duly noted in the book, because his daughter Eve was allowed to accompany him. Thirdly, I do not judge Ekman in any way badly for that singular instance of a slap. He did what came to him instinctively in the moment, with no forethought or calculation of potential costs and benefits. He was motivated to protect his daughter. That is clear.
Regarding his hot temper, he wrote about that elsewhere in the same book. In a beautifully candid and moving final chapter, Ekman gave witness to, and asked for the Dalai Lama's interpretation of, an unanticipated transformation that occurred in him after an earlier meeting with the Dalai Lama in which his daughter Eve played an important role. The Dalai Lama simply held Ekman's hand while conversing with Eve. This meeting led to a noticeable transformation and reduction of Ekman's angry tendencies. He wrote that,
“Overly intense anger had been a plague in my life until then: It began shortly after the last time my father hit me, when I was eighteen. I warned him that if he hit me again, I would hit him back. He regarded this as a threat and called the police to arrest me for threatening his life. I had to flee my home forever. Since then, very few days would go by without my having an angry impulse on which I would act in a way that I regretted afterward. I was constantly on guard, trying not to yield to such impulses and often failing. I do not think a week in my life went by, from the time I was eighteen until the time I was sixty-six [in 2000] that I did not have a couple of regrettable episodes of anger. Not a wonderful way to lead a life" (pp. 227-228).
From quoting this passage directly now, I see that my choice of the words "virtually daily" may have been a bit of an overstatement but still conveyed the essence of Ekman's authentic self-disclosure.
Professor Smith called into question the use of the word "violent" in connection with a disciplinary slap. Significantly, it was Ekman himself who selected this word to describe his past action as "compassionate, loving violence." The somewhat oxymoronic modifiers transmute the valence of the noun in this case. It may be a sign of Ekman's refined moral sensibility that he nonetheless chose to refer to his action with the term violence.
The supposition, proposed by Professor Smith to reinforce his point, of Ekman's having done nothing sets up a spurious dichotomy. It overlooks the possibility of a wide range of alternative, yet still effective, parental, educational options, in lieu of slapping, in a similar circumstance. However, what may or may not be available to any one of us depends upon our own past experience and what we have been able to learn up to any given moment in the way of creative responses to stressful, risky behavior on the part of our children or others for whom we are responsible. Like Ekman, I admit to having once, and only once, slapped one of my children, although in a different kind of circumstance. I regretted my action instantly and felt remorse that led me to much introspection. I recognized the antecedents in my own childhood and realized that I had done impulsively to my son as had been done to me when I was a child. Insight came from this for me, and with it new behavioral potentials.
A lack of common sense can be an outcome of diverse developmental trajectories and even of physical trauma that affects certain areas of the brain.
I will note again that insight into our own emotional states and motivations may at times be elusive to any of us, even the wisest, and the tendency to rationalize our behaviors is something ever to be watchful of. I do not know if anyone is wholly immune in this regard, and I am certainly not so. It remains my hope that we question the disciplinary hitting of children as an inevitable and necessary aspect of parenting and that we learn gentler, yet efficacious, alternatives.
Thanks for this opportunity for dialogue, the essential feature of this marvelous list that Louise so ably moderates.
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Dear Mitch,
I really and truly appreciate your thoughtful exposition. And, as a long-time admirer of Paul Ekman’s work at UCSF and the Dalai Lama’s worldwide vision on neurosciences, I now am motivated to obtain and read the book about him and the Dalai Lama. Perhaps there will be other gems of wisdom therein.
With warm and cordial greetings,
Roulette
__________________________________________________
From: Reilly, Richard
Sent: Sunday, March 21, 2010 10:37 PM
To: Dr. Louise Sundararajan
Subject: RE: DIALOGUES--Thoughts on a Dialogue between Paul Ekman and the Dalai Lama
In response to Mitch and Louise:
Somewhere it is said (in the Buddhist tradition) that being compassionate is like changing positions in sleep to get more comfortable -- just as natural, spontaneous, and non-deliberative. Perhaps, a parent, sensing the kind of danger a child is disposed to, simply responds instinctively with a fully compassionate intent. The difference between a slap of a child being "violent" and that slap being "compassionate" lies in whether, in fact, it protects/relieves that child from (the risk of) suffering, rather than causing a greater likelihood of suffering. And, "suffering" is not to be understood as experiencing "pain" per se; rather, it is being in a state of diminishment in comparison to one's possible (and natural) state of flourishing. So, I think that the Dalai Lama's response to Paul Ekman's example makes "Buddhist sense!"
Rich Reilly (Philosophy)
____________________________________________________
From: Mitchell Hall
To: Dr. Louise Sundararajan
Sent: Friday, April 02, 2010 2:42 AM
Subject: rebuttal so far...
by Mitch Hall
I'd like to comment on Rich Reilly's response to postings on this list that I initiated concerning a segment of dialogue between two renowned thinkers and leaders in their respective fields, the psychologist Paul Ekman and the Dalai Lama of Tibet. Reilly began with a premise that he claimed comes from "somewhere" in the Buddhist tradition. He did not attribute any source. According to his premise, "being compassionate is like changing positions in sleep to get more comfortable--just as natural, spontaneous, and non-deliberative." If that were a core Buddhist belief, then why have Buddhists cultivated rigorous meditation practices and elaborated philosophical, ethical, and psychological constructs to help us become more compassionate, mindful, and insightful? Buddhism is practically, and even etymologically, about awakening, not about sleep walking. Furthermore, Buddhists are enjoined not to believe anything that does not accord with reason, no matter who said it or where it was written. The Dalai Lama’s engaging in dialogue with pioneering scientific researchers is consonant with the value placed on reason in Buddhist tradition. He has openly stated that if scientific evidence were to disprove any traditional Buddhist beliefs, he would defer to science.
Building upon his dubious premise, Reilly offered in the second sentence an idealized image of an instinctive parental response (in this case, a slap) as having “a fully compassionate intent.” In evolutionary and physiological perspective, slapping is not a behavioral expression of compassion any more than a genuine smile is an expression of fear or rage. Rather, slapping is most often a discharge of aroused anger. The anger may have been provoked by hurt, fear, shame, or insult. With a slap, the stress response has gone into fight, rather than flight or freeze, mode. A helping hand, not a slapping one, expresses compassion. In viewing the action of slapping in this way, I am not raising any doubt about Ekman’s abiding love for his daughter and desire to protect her. Rather, I am questioning the common adult tendency, even among intelligent and generally idealistic people, to rationalize their own conditioned reactions and traditional child rearing practices that use force and cause pain to children, purportedly for the children’s own good.
It was a fortunate outcome that Ekman’s daughter Eve did not run out into the street again after having been slapped. However, this appears to have been a conditioned association between the behavior and the aversive consequence of being slapped. The child’s resulting positive behavior change does not provide evidence of the father’s cognitive or emotional state at the time of slapping. Rather, it demonstrates the power of conditioning in this singular instance. Furthermore, the effectiveness in this case does not imply that slapping should be the preferred educational option for parents who wish to dissuade running into the street or any other potentially risky or oppositional childish behavior. This was just the response available to Ekman at that moment. To his credit, it was not his habitual response. He never repeated it. Let us remember, without being slapped or otherwise inflicted with physical pain, countless children have learned not to run out into the street.
I believe we need to open our minds and hearts to the evidence that kindness and compassion, or their opposites, are learned from experience from the earliest stages of life. Abundant research has demonstrated that the use of physical punishment in raising children has deleterious effects, including increased anxiety and aggressiveness (Lansford et al., 2005; Gershoff & Bitensky, 2007). Mikulincer and Shaver (2005) reported on research findings that “compassionate feelings and values, as well as responsive, altruistic behaviors, are promoted by both dispositional and experimentally induced attachment security.” In other words, when we are confident that at least one other human being understands, accepts, values, and supports us, we feel more compassion and act more altruistically. The Oliners (1988) found that the compassionate Christians who risked their own lives to rescue Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe had been raised nonviolently, with rare to no physical punishment, and with “close family relationships in which parents model caring behavior and communicate caring values” (p. 249). Their childhoods were unusual for their time and cultures in which most children were raised punitively (Miller, 1983; deMause, 2002) Statistically, rescuers constituted only one-half of one percent of the European population. This example shows that compassion is not, for most people, natural and spontaneous, unless it has been learned socially or cultivated through conscious practice.
References
deMause, L. (2002). The emotional life of nations. New York & London: Karnac.
Gershoff, E. T. & Bitensky, S. H. (2007). The case against corporal punishment of children: Converging evidence from social science research and international human rights law and implications for U. S. public policy. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 13(4), 231-272.
Lansford J.E., Chang, L., Dodge, K.A., Malone, P.S., Oburu, P., Palmacrus, K., Bacchini, D., Pastorelli, C., Bombi, A.S., Zelli, A., Tapanya, S.,
Chaudhary, N., Deater-Deckard, K., Manke, B., & Quinn, N. (2005). Physical discipline and children's adjustment: Cultural normativeness as a
moderator. Child Development, 76 (6), pp. 1234-1246.
Mikulincer, M. & Shaver, P. R. (2005). Attachment security, compassion, and altruism. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14 (1), pp. 34-38.
Miller, A. (1983). For your own good: Hidden cruelty in childrearing and the roots of violence. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
Oliner, S. P. & Oliner, P. (1988). The altruistic personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. New York: The Free Press.
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from Dr. Louise Sundararajan
Your comments are always so thought provoking and erudite, Mitch. I think your critique is very incisive. So far as I know, compassion never stands alone in Buddhism. It is always coupled with wisdom, which entails discernment in choosing the right means to achieve the goal. Thus compassion may be spontaneous like water flowing, but wisdom is the discernment that makes sure that the flowing water does good and not damage.
Love,
Louise
______________________________________________________From: Mitch Hall
To: Dr. Louise Sundararajan
Sent: Friday, April 02, 2010 2:27 PM
Subject: Re: rebuttal so far...
Dear Louise,
Thanks so much for your appreciation of my comments and the critique I wrote last night.
My understanding of the context of compassion in Buddhism is in agreement with yours. In support of your point, I have often seen the Buddhist phrase, maha prajna maha karuna (great wisdom is great compassion). The discernment in choosing the right means to achieve the goal presupposes conscious awareness, as I understand the matter, and this differs from what Reilly was asserting. In Buddhist thinking also, compassion (karuna) is one of the four brahmaviharas (abodes of the Buddha), along with loving-kindness, altruistic joy, and equanimity. Anyhow, these are just a few more reflections. I very much like your response to Rich. As you are moderator of the list, I recognize that you have an additional level of responsibility to assure balance. It is compassionate of you to take his feelings into account so that he does not feel we are ganging up against him. Since he did address both of us by name, our responses would be appropriate. I defer to your discernment about whether to refer to him as Rich, rather than as Reilly. Since I do not know him, I kept it more formal.
Thanks for inviting me to consider a response to his posting. I enjoyed engaging with this. Meeting you and joining the DIALOGUES list has been so meaningful, validating, and beneficial to me. I am thankful to you, Louise.
Love,
Mitch