I was captivated, along with the entire nation, to learn the details of the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from the clutches of his pirate captors by US Navy Seals. The precision, the courage, the focus, the accuracy, confidence, and the decision making of this team of war specialists were truly astounding. But this was no accident. A Navy Seal will tell you that the only way to prevent the limbic system from hijacking the frontal lobe in an emergency, to maintain the ability to think clearly and not give in to panic as adrenalin and cortisone surge through your body, is practice; practice in simulated but realistic life threatening situations with a specific set of responses, over and over again. The fear will still be there, it will try to overpower you, but your brain will move your body automatically through the now familiar steps. Navy Seals train for survival because they expect to be in life or death circumstances. Those who don’t train don’t survive. In World War II, infantry platoon members resisted bonding with new recruits because they knew they would die quickly; they were rushed too soon, too unprepared into the field of battle.
Drawing a parallel nearer to home, if our children are to live tolerably, or even survive, in the coming decades of global warming, economic stress, and shifting populations they will need leadership qualities, strong character, and solid ethical foundations. But leadership, character, and ethics also require training, not just learning, beginning at an early age. And that means we need to change how we view education.
I have come to accept, slowly, reluctantly, hesitatingly, that we are indeed changing our global climate. From the time that I first became convinced that the earth’s temperature was increasing beyond the expected ups and downs that have accompanied man’s long history on our planet I began to read all that I could on the subject and I find myself visualizing three very disconcerting possibilities: the first and best case scenario, possible only through a timely and concerted global effort from all of us on the planet, would likely be unpleasant and uncomfortable; a second worse case scenario, if we change nothing, would be essentially unthinkable; and in the last we are rushing toward world-ending catastrophe totally unprepared; worse, adversely prepared.
When I lead the discussion in my eighth grade class toward the possible effects of climate change, a typical student remark is something like “Our home on the Cape would probably be under water. I guess we’ll have to move to our house in the mountains.” This response is culturally nurtured and totally appropriate to the age, perspective, and experience of a young person attending the Massachusetts junior boarding school in which I teach Leadership. Yet the remark contains two elements that appear to be universal in current American thinking: (1) the grudging realization that we might actually be inconvenienced due to a warming climate and (2) the expectation that others (government, scientists, parents) will continue to provide the solutions for us, a trickle down bail-out. But it can not be business as usual, not then, not now. Time is too short. “The fight against global warming isn’t a fight to maintain the status quo. The status quo isn’t ours to keep,” observes Marq de Villiers, author of “The End”[i]. Globally, environmentally, things are going to change. Now is not the time to prevaricate; we can not abdicate our responsibility to prepare our children to face these changes. We depend upon it – the world depends upon it. Leadership, character, and ethics need to rise to the top of our education agenda.
Even in the best case scenario of the predicted climate change potentiality an extraordinary kind of leadership will be required very soon, perhaps as soon as the very next decade; an extraordinary and unique kind of leadership demanding the dichotomous skill sets of individual initiative and self reliance partnered with a capacity for empathy, shared values, and teamwork. The warming of our global climate is bringing change, not just generally but locally and specifically. Over here the land will dry out from heat and drought and over there the land will flood from increased precipitation or sea level rising. As global temperatures begin their upward march toward the poles, areas suitable for crop production and sustainable human habitation will shift, economies will shift and people will shift with them. While we all are facing the general problem of climate change, the physical effects my community faces may be different from those that face yours. Smaller communities are likely to become isolated in their particular problems and needs and be overwhelmed. We must to be trained to respond individually, with autonomy and self reliance, yet with the capacity for empathy and collaboration and teamwork.
Now as I watch as my students enter the room and find their seats in the circle of chairs, chatting easily about the concerns of the day, I realize that these same young people I am now observing are the very ones who must all too soon face this reality and who must make a difference globally. For when I speak of a new kind of leadership, I speak not of new skills for leaders, I speak of the need for every one of us to be a leader with the skills and mindset to adapt to a changing world, to be proactive, to think, to judge for ourselves, and to act. We need to evolve a community of leaders as well as leaders of a community.
On a global perspective, the problem we face seems overwhelming. Throughout our history humans have possessed the useful trait of loyalty to tribe, to religion, to culture and nation. We are conditioned to fight and even die for our genus when we perceive it to be threatened. But as James Lovelock observes, we still find alien the concept that we are part of a much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth.[ii] It is time to recognize that we are members of a much larger tribe. The individual nations of our world continue to distract each other from recognizing the urgency for launching a timely effort to preserve sustainability on earth for all people by political unrest, intolerance, and self absorption. How can we recognize that, in fact, we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is powerful and impersonal and not concerned with our local agendas: the world’s climate?
My junior school students are themselves a metaphor for this global confusion. It is the battle of reason vs. emotion, the attempt of an underdeveloped frontal lobe to manage a surging limbic system. This uneven development of brain structures determines that before puberty the capability of my students to think abstractly, logically, and idealistically is hampered. Their ability to project consequences, to empathize effectively, to understand the importance of values and ethical thinking is limited. But other parts of their brain, those parts that govern their understanding of technology, their creative powers, and their puzzle solving skills are more than ready. Some of them have websites, most of them have a home on Face book, and some even have Internet businesses on the side. For them, global connections are commonplace. A fifteen year old Russian boy is able to create a virus that infects computers around the world but not able to see that it is wrong. There are no age limitations on the Internet; ideas are ideas and thoughts are thoughts, unclouded by age, race, or gender. In this respect, my junior school students are ready to take an active role in world citizenry now. I foresee a time, a quickly nearing time, in which they will be required to do so, because they are able. But I also fear they will not be ready. To help them become ready we must look to the Navy Seals; we must prioritize training in character and leadership and ethics.
But how can ethics be trained? Where do ethics come from? Is it nature or nurture? Brain research suggests it must be both. It seems likely that there could be genes associated with ethics passed along, an ethical reasoning, right vs. wrong, trait. A form of basic ethical decision making would have been required by early man to engage socially with any success. Research also suggests that we possess as many inactive genes as active ones and that our inactive genes go right on sleeping unless they are awakened by training, “practicing” the trait that they bear. And so training ethical processing affirms the gene traits.
The genesis of ethical leadership requires the higher cognitive reasoning of the frontal lobe to ameliorate the tendencies of the limbic areas. Neuroscientists researching how the brain makes judgments have found that an additional area of the upper brain, the somatosensory cortex, becomes activated when one makes difficult choices. This area supplies emotional context to the bodily sensations of pain and temperature, among others, as well as (apparently) feelings brought about by conscience.[iii] And that is why we literally “feel” the pain of a difficult choice or decision. But a prepubescent child lacks sufficient development of the two upper brain areas in the cognitive-emotional-somatic triangle and must rely upon the basic training of an adult framework for right vs. wrong, comfort vs. hurt, drilled again and again until the child brain has naturally matured sufficiently to feel the ‘pang’ of actual understanding. Perhaps our parents had it right all along.
The good news? There appear to be five essential shared core values world wide.[iv] They are truth, respect, responsibility, fairness, and compassion. That’s a pretty good start for ethical processing. Our increasingly diverse schools may include these core values in their basic training, traversing cultural lines without fear of giving offense. But ethical thinking needs to be taught early and often in life and it needs to be a regular part of the school curriculum. Remember, if we are not presenting our model for ethical processing in our classrooms it does not mean that our students are not learning a social formula of some sort, somewhere on a playground or in the neighborhood, for better or worse.
As to leadership, there are those who hold to the concept of a “natural born leader”, a particular beneficial convergence of genes and circumstances that occurs randomly and infrequently to elevate one member of a community beyond others as a guide and model. And while I do not dispute such occurrences, I suggest that, as in the case of our Navy Seals, that it is now of critical importance to train those characteristics of leadership in our students, to awaken those sleeping genes, and to foster a future community of leaders.
[i] De Villiers, The End, p.323
[ii] Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, p.4
[iii] Sousa, The Leadership Brain, p.200
[iv] Sousa, The Leadership Brain, p. 193.
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