If you read my last entry, Ignorance Bad for Objectivity (if you haven't, I recommend you do so first), you probably felt one of two ways afterwards:
1. Self-Righteously Infuriated
2. Self-Righteously Infuriated
What I mean is, you were most likely influenced by the angry tone I used, but in different ways depending on whether or not you agreed with me on the matter.
If you already agreed with me, you would have become angry at this Wayne Dunn guy for being such a complete idiot (This can be seen in Chris Krusey's comment on that entry). If you disagreed with me on the subject, you would have become angry at me for being such a complete idiot. Either way, my essay was ineffective.
Why? Anger.
After I had written it, I sent it to the Mudita Forum because it pertained to both Objectivism and Buddhism. However, Joshua Zader, the forum moderator, rejected my post. He said he struggled with approving it and finally decided that the tone wasn't conducive to the benevolent atmosphere that he had cultivated on the forum. After it didn't show up on the forum, I became mad because I had suspected that he wasn't going to approve it (though I suspected he might not from the beginning), but came to my senses before even confirming that he had indeed rejected it (Shameless Self-Praise).
We had a dialogue about it the next day, and I explained that I found an angry tone to be effective in engaging the reader. Joshua's response? Kindness will do that too. I believe he said something along the lines of that it has a way of disarming the reader. I complained that with kindness, I wouldn't have been able to use clever metaphors, like the wolf/straw man one. "Yes, maybe not," he responded.
With these few points made, I considered what I aimed to do with my essay. I certainly think it was entertaining, and it definitely was effective as an exercise in writing -- but these things should have been secondary to the purpose of the writing, which was to persuade. I realized then that anger is an extremely ineffective way of persuading a person.
If a person already agrees with you, it doesn't matter what you say because you're preaching to the choir -- they're only going to be influenced by your angry tone to become angry themselves, which will endow them with and strengthen an attitude of angry self-righteousness. If they don't agree with you, they're certainly not going to even consider the validity of your ideas because now they're angry, and emotions have a very powerful way of inhibiting a persons openness and objectivity. When was the last time you convinced someone of anything in the midst of a heated argument? That was most likely only possible once the two of you had some time to cool off.
Josh then suggested that I write a more effective response detailing what benefits that Buddhism and the Dalai Lama could actually provide to a business. He referred me to a study performed by Richard Davidson and Jon Kabat-Zinn in which they trained several people in meditation at a medium-sized company named Promega. The results were pretty astounding, and here are the important points from the University of Wisconsin Medical School website:
In the UW study, participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The experimental group, with 25 subjects, received training in mindfulness meditation from one of its most noted adherents, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. (Kabat-Zinn, a popular author of books on stress reduction, developed the mindfulness-based stress reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.) This group attended a weekly class and one seven-hour retreat during the study; they also were assigned home practice for an hour a day, six days a week. The 16 members of the control group did not receive meditation training until after the study was completed.For each group, in addition to asking the participants to assess how they felt, the research team measured electrical activity in the frontal part of the brain, an area specialized for certain kinds of emotion. Earlier research has shown that, in people who are generally positive and optimistic and during times of positive emotion, the left side of this frontal area becomes more active than the right side does.
The findings confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis: the meditation group showed an increase of activation in the left-side part of the frontal region. This suggests that the meditation itself produced more activity in this region of the brain. This activity is associated with lower anxiety and a more positive emotional state.
The research team also tested whether the meditation group had better immune function than the control group did. All the study participants got a flu vaccine at the end of the 8-week meditation class. Then, at four and eight weeks after vaccine administration, both groups had blood tests to measure the level of antibodies they had produced against the flu vaccine. While both groups (as expected) had developed increased antibodies, the meditation group had a significantly larger increase than the controls, at both four and eight weeks after receiving the vaccine.
What business couldn't benefit from their employees having an increased resilience against stress, a greater orientation towards positive emotions as well as possessing a stronger immune system? (If you'd like you can read more about this mindfulness study.) I probably won't get around to writing another response like Josh suggested because I'll lose interest in the time it would take -- but I think the reference here is adequately informative enough, not only for my loyal readers, but for Wayne Dunn as well. That is, if he ever ends up visting; Who knows -- maybe he'll find my blog during a bout of ego-surfing.
And to Wayne Dunn, I would like to make an apology. I'm sorry for being so vituperative and ripping into you as I did; I just got angry about what -- and especially how -- you had written. I don't mean to sound condescending when I say this, but this may serve as a lesson to you: Anger only cultivates more anger, and that's bad for objectivity.
Posted by Marshall at May 6, 2004 09:24 PM