Laatste wapenfeiten

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Destructive behavior

The American psychologist Daniel Goleman produced another fascinating book. The title: Destructive Emotions (Random House, 2003).

The 366 pages are the outcome of a dialogue between 12 scientists and philosophers, who sat down two years ago with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, under auspices of the Life and Mind Institute.

Journalists, who study the daily stream of international news, are virtually exclusively dealing with random irrationality or plain madness demonstrated by people everywhere. They are inclined to lack the patience or set the time aside, to sit down with a book like Goleman's, in which superior minds are trying to trace the roots of the lack of sound judgment everywhere. What causes this ever increasing epidemic of destructive behavior, as seen at the start of the 21st century on all continents?

The Dalai Lama is convinced that Buddhism and science can both contribute to bring out-of-control emotions more in line with reality. He says: ‘In Buddhist training, it is essential to investigate reality. Science follows its own ways to go about this investigation. While the purposes of science may differ of those of Buddhism, both search for knowledge and understanding. We Buddhists can make use of the findings of science to clarify our understanding of the world we live in, but scientists may also be able to utilize some insights from Buddhism.’

‘We seem to be living in the Stone Age so far as our handling of human relations is concerned,’ noted Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport in his study The Nature of Prejudice (Doubleday, New York, 1958). I was a correspondent at United Nations headquarters at the time, when I developed in the 5th year in my profession the habit to look for explanations why people constantly behaved like lunatics. Allport coined the famous phrase: ‘It's easier to split an atom than a prejudice.’ That was half a century ago.

I write about this, because August 11, 2003, I participated in a symposium on the Future of Israel at Leiden University. There

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were a few hundred students. At 78, they looked to me like wonderful young kids. The discussions remained at the level of terrorism versus freedom fighters, Israeli wrongs versus Arab wrongs, and visa versa. But there was not one moment the entire evening, that someone suggested to examine the origin of the destructive behavior of masses, like Allport did in 1958 and Goleman did in 2003. Science has made such fantastic inroads on understanding the mind. Has the time not arrived to try to explore the deeper roots of these problems in order to correct them before someone someday blows us all to hell? I intended to redirect the discussion into this direction, but admit, the mood of the evening seemed not ready for it. But perhaps some students will pick up the Goleman-Dalai Lama book.