Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein: Stop to Think Who Matters (Interview)

Taking place today in chilly Davos was a session called Stop to Think Who Matters. Alec managed to catch up with one of the panelists, American author and philosopher Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein, to chat about the fundamentals behind human nature, our inherent need to matter in this world, and how that affects us in a global context. An exceptional read, Newberger-Goldstein talks tribe-centrism; how we as a species are self-centred and protective of our own kind, and how we absolutely need to learn, and feel, in order to change that. – CH

ALEC HOGG: We’ve just sat in on a fascinating discussion on ‘Stop to think who matters’ and one of the most insightful panelists is Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein, who is a Professor from a young age and an author but in many ways, not just a philosopher. You really, did draw on history, just to explain to us that actually, everybody on earth does matter.

REBECCA NEWBERGER-GOLDSTEIN: Yes, everybody matters but one of the interesting things is that it’s taken us a while to realise that. This has been one long revolution after another that has gotten us to this point where we actually, (at least theoretically, philosophically, and morally) if we were asked ‘who matters’, we would know enough to say ‘everybody matters’. Black, white, woman, man, children, those within our tribe, and those outside of our tribe. That has taken us a very long time.

Evolution, by which we’re shaped, did not give us the capacity to realise this: that everybody matters. What evolution did was shape us so that we feel we matter, our children matter, and those in our tribe matter, and we have lot of detectors to be able to distinguish between those who are in our tribe and those who are outside are tribe. We’ve had to overcome our bias, our ‘for me and my kind’ bias to get to this point. Self- centredness and tribe-centredness.

ALEC HOGG: You used slavery very well in illustrating this development over the ages.

REBECCA NEWBERGER-GOLDSTEIN: Yes, because this was an enormous institution. Every corner of the globe had slaves and our great moral thinkers from the past – the ancient Greeks e.g. Plato and Aristotle – who many people still cite as having known everything morally worth knowing…they saw nothing wrong with enslaving non-Greeks, whom the called barbarians. The Old Testament and the New Testament is all about slavery, so this was an enormous change, which we had to go through. Now, slavery is not legal anywhere in the world.

ALEC HOGG: But it still happens.

REBECCA NEWBERGER-GOLDSTEIN: It happens, but it happens secretively and shamefully and in some sense, it happens metaphorically. Chattel, slavery, and people just being sold as chattel doesn’t happen openly the way it did before, and that in itself is just an enormous moral triumph that our species managed. I think it’s very incumbent upon us to look at how that was done because there were great economic costs to it. Great changes in moral intuitions had to take place in order for it to occur. So, how did we do this? Because we still have tremendous inequities that we have to solve where economic sacrifices are going to have to be made. How did we do it before?

ALEC HOGG: Opening of eyes: you used an example of Uncle Tom’s cabin.

REBECCA NEWBERGER-GOLDSTEIN: Yes. I do think that we tend to think so much about political solutions and changes of law. It’s one thing to have a philosophical argument that this is wrong. People have to really, feel it. They need for feel how wrong this is, to feel how other lives matter – lives that have been thought not to matter at all.

One of the ways we do this is through art (and I’m thinking particularly of movies and narrative art) – movies, plays, and novels that do a magical thing. You actually identify with the characters. You live through their emotions. You become them and that is such a strong sense of understanding how much they matter. By participating in their story, it can work on the emotional level.

ALEC HOGG: It also seems to be levels of consciousness in different parts of the world – perhaps more evolved in others, as we are seeing in society at the moment. What’s your take? Just to move away from rich and poor in the rich world, to what’s happening around the world and almost, the exponential growth in hatred on the basis of religion. Is this because people feel they don’t matter?

REBECCA NEWBERGER-GOLDSTEIN: I do. I really think that the whole emergence of religion in the first place was an answer to ‘what can we do to make ourselves matter’. Of course, that we mattered to God…it’s almost like a narcotic. You matter, cosmically. It’s such a strong endorsement of one’s individual mattering – God loves you. If you were born, you mattered because God meant you to be born. As the world becomes more and more secularised and these inequities grow, those who are left out of this are going to cling all the more fervently to what I consider as ‘a mattering narcotic’, this ‘I may not be succeeding. I may be unemployed. I may have no future, but I really matter. I matter to God and none of you other people (children of Satan) matter’. If we want to fight this kind of thing, I think we have to think about social justice and social justice means not just paying lip service to the fact that everybody’s life matters but really, making people feel as if their lives matter.

ALEC HOGG: The world’s currently a scary place. We’re seeing it in every facet of society and certainly, here in Davos as well. Is there any room for optimism?

REBECCA NEWBERGER-GOLDSTEIN: Yes, I think so. For me, the way I am optimistic is I study history and I think of how far we’ve actually come in just being able to say – even if we don’t act on it, but to be able to recognise it – that everybody matters. That has been a real process of learning – of re-educating our evolutionarily formed psyche, which only cares about us and our own kind.

We’ve come very far and we have changed our institutions as well. To me, slavery is a very cruel and inhuman punishment. There were arguments against this and they were changed. In the Middle Ages, if you look at the way people lived, the rates of violence were extraordinary. People burned cats for entertainment. There was bear baiting. There was bullfighting. Now, we cringe at this, emotionally. It’s not just intellectually that we know this is wrong. We feel disgust.

We keep changing but the way that we change is we have to firstly, isolate and identify what’s wrong and then be made to really feel it enough so that we going to be willing to give up some of our gains.

ALEC HOGG: And we’re doing that.

REBECCA NEWBERGER-GOLDSTEIN: And we do it. Something very interesting is that in every society that gave up slavery, they never reverted. Once you realise this…or with gender inequality, a battle we’re still fighting… Again, I think that we’re prone (by our evolutionary psychology) to favour males over females so that we have to use our intellect, reflection, or moral sensibility to overcome this but once you gain this, you don’t go back because you see it’s the right thing.

ALEC HOGG: A sense of optimism. Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein, an author, Professor of Philosophy, and a panelist here on the session called ‘Stop to think who matters’.

Visited 64 times, 1 visit(s) today
Categories WEF