For Good People to Do Nothing

I want to address the assumption of human ‘badness’ — that people resort to violence when faced with adversity and that ultimately we are competitive in nature, rather than collaborative. I want to do this because it’s part of understanding how we can go about self-reflecting and take steps to dismantle our implicit biases. I also want to address the way we perpetuate these beliefs by thinking of ourselves as ‘separate from’ or outside of a situation as if we aren’t intrinsically linked with the world around us and therefore influential of and influenced by a multitude of causes, conditions and circumstances. This is about seeking to understand how personal responsibility functions within the whole. We are none of us free of the influence of the world in which we grew up.

I am not saying that nature doesn’t play a role and that the role isn’t just as significant as nurture, because it is. It is not a case of nature versus nurture as these two things cannot be separated. The lines we draw to make navigating the world easier do not exist. There is always blurring at the edges, if edges can even be found. We aren’t inherently separate and our words and actions, fuelled by our thoughts, have more impact than we realise. I want to talk about how we can change the system by changing the way we think because we are part of the system and being a component part means what we do matters.

There is a common refrain that human beings are violent. Often this is said in response to some atrocity, accompanied by a lament about losing faith in humanity. Noticing how we use language, the thing that stands out is that such statements put a person outside this realm, looking in, as if what they said doesn’t apply to them.

Someone says: Human beings are inherently violent.

If the speaker is a human being, that means they should believe they too are inherently violent. And yet, when confronted by this, they often say ‘well, not me.’

Add to this a fickle and easily lost and gained ‘faith’ in humanity, whereby ‘humanity’ seems to be judged purely by virtue. Humanity, however, is not synonymous with virtue. It’s synonymous with humans, a diverse race of beings with a broad range of emotions and experiences, embodiments, languages, religions and cultures. The only unifying aspect of humanity is that we all just want to feel safe and content, to have a sense of ease and wellbeing. In this regard, I have unwavering faith in humanity, as I have yet to see any human action that isn’t carried out to this end.

“No one does anything because they want to feel worse.”

- Pema Chodron

When we say that all human beings are inherently violent or ‘bad’, but we don’t mean ourselves or our social circle, or when we say we have lost faith in humanity whenever we encounter less appealing or even downright appalling sides of it, we deny our own humanity. We are saying ‘I’ am ‘not like that’ and therefore ‘humanity’, and human behaviour, is something apart from me.

The problem with buying into the myth of basic badness, or speaking about humanity as though we are outside of it, is we don’t account for our own actions. We refuse to look at how what someone else is doing is not outside the realm of our own capabilities. We do it with positive activities as well, of course, but I want to address how we do it with the negative.

We see something racist, sexist, transphobic — for example — and our first reaction is to think: I’m not like that. We believe because we would not say or do something so blatantly against human rights as someone who is consciously racist, that we are not racist at all. We believe that we are somehow not influenced by the patriarchal society in which we were raised, and therefore, regardless of our gender, entirely free of sexist lines of thought and reasoning. We believe being brought up in a community that taught us it was wrong to make fun of someone with a learning disability means we are incapable of discrimination according to ability. Another way to put this is, when we think that we are ‘good’ people and ‘good’ people are incapable of discrimination, we don’t notice our implicit bias, and in fact will even use strange and faulty reasoning not to address these biases within ourselves.

Examples of this flawed reasoning come in the form of the person who states that ‘All lives matter’ or the woman identified feminist who digs in her heals against a transgender woman joining a feminist group, or the person who insists that how a woman dresses validates someone’s choice to rape her. My choice to use ‘person’ in the first and last example was conscious because there is also the permeating belief that the structures of the society we live in don’t form biases in the minds of those who experience oppression because of them. Black people can believe racist things about other Black people, women can be sexist, gay people can be homophobic. On top of that, one person can experience marginalisation and privilege and not equate the oppression they experience on the one hand with the oppression they perpetuate on the other. I have met staunchly conservative gay people, for example, who do not see how class discrimination and homophobia are equally damaging.

When invited to notice this sort of hypocrisy, people often get defensive. Because we consider ourselves to be ‘good’ and we are not consciously racist, sexist, ableist, etc. the assumption is we have no work to do. We reinforce this by ignoring the privileges we have and focusing only on our experiences of marginalisation, as if being part of a marginalised group means we can’t be capable of discrimination, despite all proof to the contrary.

Defensiveness is an excellent signifier of where our implicit bias lies. As soon as we feel the need to assert that we aren’t a certain way, we usually follow it up with a statement that highlights the exact opposite.

“This is not a race issue, anyone who says as much is doing so because I’m white — it’s reverse racism*.”

“I’m not sexist; she was a bitch.”

“I’m not ableist. Since when is it a bad thing to say someone is an inspiration?”

*Reverse racism doesn’t exist. Full stop.

Mahzarin Banaji, co-author of Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People and co-founder of Project Implicit, says, in her interview with Krista Tippett:

“…“good people” is extremely important to me. I do believe that we have changed over the course of our evolutionary history into becoming better and better people who have higher and higher standards for how we treat others. And so we are good. And we must recognize that, and yet, ask people the question, “Are you the good person you yourself want to be?” And the answer to that is no, you’re not. And that’s just a fact. And we need to deal with that if we want to be on the path of self-improvement.”

Developing self-awareness is a tricky business. It’s uncomfortable to look at our hypocrisy and to own up to where we have growth to do. Letting go of the idea that being a ‘good’ person means we are incapable of causing harm is not easy. Being human is not easy.

As a Buddhist, I have a formal practice centred on cultivating self-awareness, but even before coming to Buddhism it was something I did. It is because of my profound self-curiosity that Buddhism is such an excellent fit. Here is an entire body of teachings encouraging me to question and challenge what I think I know. It is a humbling experience as I’ve come to recognise the biases I hold, the patterns of thought or the way the culture in which I was brought up in has had a negative influence. But it’s also been empowering. Because of the teachings on basic goodness and my ability to recognise it, I find myself less inclined to cling to fixed ideas of myself as only being one way. I recognise that there are many reasons for the implicit biases I have, but they do not excuse me from taking personal responsibility to address them.

By taking personal responsibility—not thinking myself a victim but rather, someone who is capable of owning my actions, thoughts and reasoning—I can see the role I play in the greater whole. Violence is not my default and I don’t believe it is the default of the people around me. I am also not inherently or consciously racist, sexist or ableist. These, like all social constructs, are learned things. We do not learn them through strict rote, but through the subtlety of the language we use, the images we see in media, the things we read. Because society is made up of humanity, and I am part of humanity, my ability to change my mind, to notice and address the implicit biases I hold, is also my ability to change the world, to dismantle these constructs from within.

This is not an easy nor comfortable path. Indeed, if it were comfortable, we would all be doing it. Feeling comfortable and feeling safe are not synonymous. I have friends with experiences that differ from my own, and therefore I have friends who I can rely on to point out when I say something ignorantly white, middle-class or gender-binaried. To have such things pointed out is not comfortable — it’s not meant to be — but because of the relationship I have with them, it is safe. I understand they are not attacking me personally, but attacking something in my line of thinking so I can dismantle it for the greater good of all of humanity.

It’s not enough to decide we are good when we are all capable of being better. We matter. What we think matters. How we think matters. We are intrinsically linked, utterly subjective in our existence, and when we, as good people, step into the uncomfortable realm of admitting we have blind spots, we will only become better people, and ultimately create a better world.

~

Originally published on Medium