Combating Ignorance

Rosh HaShanah Day 5775
Rabbi Anne Persin

Last night, I evoked images of a shiny, happy rainbow world but let’s be honest, our world is a mess.  Between Ebola and ISIS, the Ukraine and Ferguson, Boko Haram and the NFL, one might just conclude that our world is falling apart.  It’s downright biblical; war, plague and pestilence, virulent anti-Semitism, terror and natural disasters, murder and mayhem; we live amidst an alphabet of woe – as expressed by Ashamnu.  With so much information at our fingertips, we could detail each and every one of these tragedies.  Yet, still, every Rosh HaShanah we turn to one another and smile and say, l’shana tovah umetukah, have a sweet and good year!  No matter how bad, how dark, how hard things get, we are a people in which tikvah, hope, is ever-present.   

Or are we?  I recently was turned onto a TED Talk by Hans & Ola Rosling.  Hans Rosling is a professor of global health in Sweden and Ola, his son is director and co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation, an organization determined to combat ignorance throughout the world through the joy of statistics.  Honestly, it is a foundation that has taken on the monumental task of curating research based statistics from around the world and making it really accessible and actually fun so that all of us can become better informed about this global village we live in.

So, Hans, the professor dad, and Ola, the foundation son, did a TED Talk together this past June in Berlin, Germany about not being ignorant.  Hans began the talk by asking the audience a series of multiple choice questions from their Ignorance Project:

1. How did deaths per year from natural disasters change in the last century?
1. More than doubled
2. Remained about the same
3. Decreased to less than half*
2. Women aged 30 spent how many years in school? (Men aged 30 spent 8 years)
1. 7 years*
2. 5 years
3. 3 years
3. In the last 20 years, how did the percentage of people living in extreme poverty change? (extreme poverty meaning not having enough food for the day)
1. Almost doubled
2. Remained about the same
3. Almost halved*
4. What percentage of the world’s one-year-old children is vaccinated against measles?
1. 20% vaccinated
2. 50% vaccinated
3. 80% vaccinated*
5. What is the life expectancy of the world population?
1. 50 years
2. 60 years
3. 70 years*

Not only did the group get every question wrong, for many of the questions they were abysmally wrong!  To be fair, I didn’t do so well myself.  I tended towards the middle answer for every question figuring things aren’t usually as good as I want them to be, but they can’t be that bad!  When in fact, as you may have noticed, for each and every question the right answer was the best answer: we are not dying in natural disasters as much as we used to be, in fact, our life expectancy around the globe is pretty good.  We are vaccinating our kids at a high rate.  In only 20 years the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has been cut in half.  Women have nearly caught up with men in their educational opportunities.  Finally, Hans and Ola explained that the income disparity around the world has improved by leaps and bounds in less than 40 years’ time.  Maybe my shiny, happy rainbow world isn’t so fictitious!

And yet, we see horrible things happening around the world, both near and far.  And yet, the majority of people assumed the worst on every single question.  Perhaps, we have simply become too hardened by all of the horrible things we see every day.  Or perhaps, we are not seeing the world as it really is.

According to the Rosling men, we have tremendous biases that keep getting in our way from seeing how our world has improved in a century, a score, a decade, or even a year.  We are biased because, no matter where you grew up, your neighborhood was not representational.  There are TOO MANY different shades and hues of people and experiences and life situations for your family, town, school, job to be truly representational.  Whether you come from Kalamazoo or Timbuktu, you have only a chelek, a piece of the puzzle.  To make matters worse, in today’s global village, it is literally impossible to be truly informed of every point of view.  I am not even sure we are capable of being informed of every topic of concern or interest around the world.  And our news outlets do not really help our situation.  The media is very savvy about choosing news items that will get people’s attention and people like excitement – the more unusual the better.  So, for example, on average there are less than 5 fatal shark attacks every year WORLD WIDE and, yet, shark week puts hundreds of thousands of people on edge that they are going to come face to face with a killer shark.  We have a disproportionate concern for anything that taps into our most base fears.  

I lived in Israel for two years and people in the states would constantly ask me, “aren’t you scared of being in a terrorist attack over there?”  I tried to explain, over and over again, that I was more likely to be the victim of a violent crime on the streets of Chicago than be bombed while in Jerusalem.  This is still true today.  But, here in America, where street crime – even violent street crime – is commonplace, we have gotten used to it.  We get over it.  We move on.  A terrorist bombing, on the other hand, sends us into a frenzy in which we are certain to be the next target.  Just for the record, in the past year, 42 people in Israel have been victims of terrorism; in 2013 nearly 2500 people were murdered in just the top ten cities in America for violent crimes and this does not include any other definition of homicide other than murder.  But terrorism is exciting – in a horrible, horrible way.  Terrorism is the shark attack of human on human violence; on the one hand, we know it almost never happens; on the other hand, we are absolutely certain that when it happens, it will certainly happen to us.

It is time that we meet our biases head on and start taking a bit of control over how we see the world.  There is no way that you or I will ever be able to cleanse ourselves of all our biases;  I am not sure that we should even have that as a goal.  Merely, that we recognize what our biases are, where do they come from, and how do they shape our way of seeing the world.  Think about the neighborhood that you grew up in.  What was the dominant religion?  Ethnicity? Race? Class? Political affiliation? What about where you went to school? Were your parents similar or different in their backgrounds or views?  How broad was the rainbow of ideas and values and experiences around you when you were a kid?  How about today? Religion, ethnicity, race, class, political affiliation – how similar or different are the backgrounds or views of your peers to you?  How broad is the rainbow of ideas and values and experiences around you now?

If you are having a hard time answering the now questions, then I have a challenge for you: ask the people you spend time with about who they are – where they come from, what they believe in, what ideas make them hum.  Do not interrupt them while they are telling you.  Do not contradict them, no matter how wrong you are sure they are.  Do not make assumptions for the better or for the worse.  Just hear their story.  Let their story be one more hue that colors your world.  The more stories you can collect, the prettier a world you will be able to see.

We will not be able to truly meet our biases head on, though, if we do not acknowledge the damage our media does in trying to turn our Technicolor world into all black and white.  We have adopted a fallacy, in this country, that sets up an unhealthy relationship with our media and that is the notion of objectivity.  No media outlet is objective because no human is objective.  We all have biases, all of us, every one, which would include those people who create and produce and report our news.  I promise you that whatever your preferred news outlet is, they are biased.  I am not calling out any particular news outlet.  I happen to know that not everyone in this room shares the same preferences for where they get their news and yet I am positive that your choice news outlet is biased.  So is mine!  Their biases are reflected not only in the opinions they offer but also in the stories they choose.  Every media outlet has to curate their news – they have to pick and choose what news they are going to bring to their customers that best represent their values and concerns.  Even in the 24 hour news cycle, there seems to be limited time.

Ideally, we would get our news from more than one source.  Even more ideally, we would get our news from sources that disagree with one another!  Again, if you are up for a challenge, try adding a different news source and see how that alters your view of the world;  do not replace your current preferred source – just add a second one that has different biases.  If you don’t have the time or inclination to listen intently to the other side, I get it.  Consider this much smaller challenge, when watching or reading your preferred news outlet, take a moment to think about other viewpoints on the topic at hand; don’t agree or disagree, just think about some other ways of approaching that story.  How might you react if you were richer or poorer, a different gender, race, or religion?  What if you were from another country?  While you may not be able to walk in another person’s shoes, you can, for a moment, suppose what their shoes may feel like.  The more perspectives we listen to and consider, the more we recognize just how many perspectives there are out there – I’m thinking, at least, 7.2 billion.  

By the way, the Rosling men ask us to take a few things from their talk and number one is: the world is improving, every century, every decade, every year.  Yes, we still have disease – but today we have more and better cures and treatments so that less people are succumbing to rampant disease than ever before.  Yes, we still have natural disasters – but the death toll from natural disasters has been cut in half in the past hundred years.  Yes, we still have war – but more nations of people have made treaties, have actively sought peace with their neighbors as well as with peoples all of over the globe.  I cannot help but think of Israel in 1948.  When Israel declared independence in 1948 EVERY SINGLE neighboring country wanted it destroyed, wiped off the face of the earth.  Today, Israel has peace treaties with two out of the four: Egypt & Jordan.  Things get better.  This world improves.  And isn’t this really the message of Rosh HaShanah?  

Every year, at the start of the New Year, we look closely at where we have been – what’s been good and what’s been not so good and we try to throw away some of the bad and strengthen some of the good.  Every year we get better.  Every year we improve.  This year, listen to the stories of the people around you.  This year, get more perspectives on everything.  This year, appreciate how things have improved in the world, in the people around you, in yourself.  5775 is the Year of the Rainbow.  This year, make note of just how many shades and hues there are.

Shanah tova tikateivu!