• Home
• About
• Blog Roll

To speak up or not to speak up?
January 15, 2008

This past weekend, a couple of events challenged my new year’s resolution to speak up. It was only January 12 and how to carry out my resolve already became thorny.

In the first event, a neighbor posted an event on our neighborhood email group – donate unwanted electronics and raise money for a local special education school. Help the environment and raise funds for a good cause, right? While I admire people for organizing such an event, I have also come to realize the peril of e-recycling. Many of us think we are doing the right thing for the environment by recycling our electronics. Unfortunately most of the e-waste is shipped to third world countries and “recycled” there – precious metals stripped and toxics dumped in the local environment. So do I tell all the neighbors about what I learned in the past year risking offending the event organizers and sounding somewhat righteous? After having a convoluted internal dialog with myself (I did not imagine speaking up could be so hard when I made the resolution), I did send an email to the group with links to a few resources that I had found useful. Five people immediately wrote back and thanked me for the information. Perhaps a few people were offended, but at least five people were informed. My resolve got a little bolder.

The next day, I went to a baby shower. One of the acquaintances there mentioned that after having a baby, they had to upgrade their car to a Hummer H2 because they simply needed more room. I really wanted to say, “but, but, we have two kids and we have a small car. Not having enough space has never been an issue.” I bit my tongue instead. It would not go well. So my resolve took a couple of steps back.

(courtesy of discoveryeducation.com)

To speak up or not to speak up? That’s a tough question, isn’t it? After all, who wants to be judged or preached to? Why did I speak up in the first case, but choose to be silent for the second? New York Time had a fascinating piece this past weekend about moral instinct by Steven Pinker, a renowned professor of Psychology at Harvard University. I am borrowing a few interesting sentences from the long but excellent article to examine my own dilemma:

“…the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres (harm avoidance, fairness, community, authority and purity) are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life depends on the culture.”

“The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up.”

“Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere.”

Though many of us have moved the environmental causes to the top of our moral stack, we need to be practically aware that many other people use a whole set of different criteria for their moral ranking. When we flip on the moralization switch – “the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause” – we may end up inviting confrontation rather than finding solutions.

Back to my resolution to speak up. Should I then not speak up in fear of being perceived as trying to climb onto the high moral ground? Hardly so. I believe there is a great difference between relating information and helpful tools and passing judgment. In my own mind, the first case (neighborhood e-recycling), I felt more comfortable because I was providing facts and resources. In the second case, it would have been dangerously close to passing a judgment had I said, “thou shall drive a smaller car because I manage to.”

After analyzing my own speaking up experience, I plan to continue providing facts and resources whenever relevant conversations and occasions arise. Even though I still think driving a Hummer is utterly unnecessary, I will keep that opinion to myself (for the most part). After all, if I tried hard enough (switching jobs and schools is not an impossibility), we could have become a one-car family. Most of us have a long way to go when it comes to limiting our impact on the environment.

It has only been two weeks into 2008. Undoubtedly I will encounter many situations in the gray zone. I may offend people by saying the wrong things or I may be disappointed with myself for being a coward. At least it will not be boring to muddle through this maze whether it is moral, ethical, or practical.

I would love to hear your experience and thoughts.

CindyW at Organicpicks

If you enjoyed this entry, please subscribe to the Organic Picks Blog

Copyright 2007 Organicpicks