Transcript

Moral Imagination and Moral Responsibility: Daniel Swartzman at TEDxUofIChicago

good afternoon for the last 35 years I have been teaching at the University of Illinois Chicago and I've been teaching a course in Social ethics the the ethics of public policymaking or sometimes the lack thereof and um most of the students that I get um are new to Public Health uh they're most of them are are working towards a masters in public health and so we start with the question of what is public health which probably for a general audience is a decent place to start so we're talking about a place not a profession but a place where scientists and social movements get together uh for the goal of um preventing death at too young an age and eliminating unnecessary suffering and each semester I start a conversation with the students by asking them why are they doing that what what is their motivation why are they in public health um first off I want to make sure that they they aren't under the illusion that they're in public health for the big bucks because that is definitely not the case what it boils down to as the conver conversation goes on is that we're doing this because of our urge to care for the other but this turns out to be a complex issue because the other is a complex concept so I would argue that there are at least two dimensions for the other one is whether the person is real to you or an abstraction and the other is whether or not you're related or you're unrelated so you can see it's a 2 by two table every professor at a school of Public Health has to put everything into a two 2 x two table it's in our contracts and uh and so you can you can get real related for instance my children these are my children this was taken on the day when they all three discovered that even though they were living 1,000 miles apart they had all bought exactly the same pair of glasses and I said you know you guys are like a like a fashion show and so this is H they they were voguing for me uh another example if uh if somebody is a clinician then the real and related are their patients okay these are people that are real you can poke them and you have a relationship to them you and you completely understand what your relationship is the one of the other cells is abstract but related so these are people or uh um groups of people that you're related to but they're an abstra raction you can't poke them so for me a good example of that is my ethnic group um Jews um another example might be my children's unborn children okay at the moment I don't have any grandchildren um but but I'm related to the idea that I will have posterity that I will have descendants okay it's an abstraction but I'm completely related to it so much so that I embarrass my children then there are the real and unrelated and you see these people every day of your life These are people who are absolutely real you could walk over and tap them on the shoulder but you have no idea what your relationship is to these people okay these these may be people who could be your best friends if you got to know him or they could be a terrible person you don't know so somebody who's stranded on the side of the road or somebody who's beggar these are real but unrelated others a perfect example of this is Wesley atrey uh who a few years ago saw a young um uh white man standing on the subway platform in in New York and this young man fell into the tracks and Wesley atrey having no relationship to this person at all jumped down and pressed his body down on the man's body as the train rolled over them um just a classic example of caring for the the the real but unrelated other the hardest group to care for is that fourth cell which is the abstract and unrelated other this in public health I refer to this as the truly other I started my career as a lob for environmental groups and I would go out and I would say we need clean air and the question is for whom um because I never met anybody who ever came up to me and said you know I liked your work at The Lung Association thank you very much for doing that because it was all completely the truly other um one of the things that makes working in public health a noble activity is that we pick for ourselves that cuz we don't know exactly who it is that we're helping but we have the moral imagination to spread from these uh drunken uh revelers in New Orleans um we have the moral IM imaginations that says we care for these people even though we don't know who they are we're not related to them we care for these people it's easy to care for the real and related everybody cares for the real and related others in their lives and most of us find the moral imagination stretch the their moral imagination over the real uh I'm sorry over the abstract and related it gets harder to to find the moral imagination to care for the the uh real but unrelated and it takes a great deal of moral imagination to care for the abstract and related so I always imagine this guy out in the suburbs of Chicago who has no interest in infinite mortality on the west side of the city he doesn't care about it if there are a lot of little black kids who don't live to the age of one it's just not inside the frontiers of his moral imagination but this is a really good man he cares for his family he's a great neighbor he's a active participant in his church you know for for everything that we judge this is a caring individual it's just that the frontiers of his moral imagination are limited and then these people turn into these people after Katrina and this guy who would never think to to focus on uh infin mortality on the west side of the city he goes and he rents a big old truck and he drives up and down his neighborhood collecting clothing and drives a thousand miles to New Orleans to distribute this clothing for free because these people got inside his moral imagination so one of the things that I'm arguing is that we need to find ways to stretch people's moral imagination to find their in their own experiences their relationships to these more attenuated others and one of the way that is easy to do that is through narrative we just saw this recently when the new town parents went to Congress and sat there and told about the children that they'd lost they it's impossible not to let that into your moral imagination so if I may I'm going to give you a narrative I'm going to tell you the story about my parents so you saw the picture of my kids um those are two of them this is before the third one was even born so this is an old picture and that's my father in the middle if I may I'm going to tell you his story Twice first in portrait and then with your permission I'm going to tell you the same story but in landscape the second time so my father was born in Odessa Russia um and his father was a polish jew um and he was a business person working in O Odessa and when the Russian Revol Russian Revolution came along the family had to leave it was not a good place to be a Jewish business person so they were on their way back to Warsaw and they were stopped by a couple of uh Soviet soldiers who proceeded to take everything they had and then started talking about how they would kill them and my father my three-year-old father stood up and wagged his fingers at the soldiers and said you can't kill my family and the the soldiers laughed and said okay get out of here and so my father and his parents and his sister made it back to Warsaw where they had plenty of money and and actually my father lived a very comfortable life he was actually a bit of a diletant he didn't have a job he had no profession no sense of the future he was just sort of living uh a pleasant life in in warsa until September 1st of 1939 when Hitler crossed the frontier into Poland and my father walked East out of town and on the way out of town walking he ran into his father my grandfather and that's when he realized that my grandmother had not made it out she was still in Warsaw Nazi occupied Warsaw as the ghetto was being formed my father walked back into Warsaw uh he was blonde and blueeyed it's hard to tell from this picture um my grandmother was blonde and blue-eyed um he found her passing uh being uh taken care of by a a Catholic Family who was taking care of her it took him a couple of weeks staying with his family before they got out of Warsaw again and they found their way to Lithuania where they got matched up again with my grandfather there were tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania and many of them got out by getting a visa to go to Japan and then a an travel visa to go to cirasa which is a Little Dutch colony in the uh Caribbean so my father and his family traed across Siberia uh and ended up many many months later and actually they ended up in Kobe Japan on December 8th 1941 which if you account for the International Date Line is Pearl Harbor day so no Pearl Harbor no Dan Schwartzman uh because he would have gotten a visa to Chicago excuse me to uh uh the United States and never met my mother but in fact he ended up having to go to Shanghai China because that's the only place that he could go they didn't have travel papers and lo and behold he found a job um and he turned out to be really good at it he was a salesperson and he was terrific as a salesperson um around the corner from the the store that he worked at was a little cafeteria called The malinki Cafe which in Russian means little cafe and that was run by my mother um my father used to say that my mother gave him free cream puffs my mother denied this completely uh they got married uh he adopted my mother's child from a first marriage um they had a a daughter my sister and by 1947 they were ready to come to the United States they arrived in the United States with $700 worth of hair nuts uh so basically they had two little kids and no money my father a salesperson spoke no English and had to find a job so he went up to Seattle Washington um and he started loading and unloading boats he was a long shoreman my uh mother and my siblings were still in San Francisco and then months later they came up and and joined him after a while he learned enough English to get a job as a salesperson and by the way to beat me at every game of Scrabble I ever played with him even after I went to law school I'm I'm still not over that irritation um and um uh actually got very successful and and from working class got to middle class and then got just at the upper layers of middle class the lower layer of upper middle class um had a nice house um had three kids who did exceptionally well my brother never went to college um but turns out is an Electronics genius and has three patents and ended up with his own computer company and retired a few years ago very well off um my sister the first of of our of our family to go to college actually ended up at Brown University on a full ride scholarship 4 years no pay um I went to the most expensive Law School in the country um and I thought that my parents had figured out a way to pay for this um my sister retired a couple of years ago and she's also very well off uh me not so much uh you know one of the central ironies of teaching college is that you can't afford to send your children there and um but I've done fairly well okay I I've done fairly well and you could not tell my father that the American dream didn't exist because he'd lived it he'd come here penniless and had three kids who went to IV League schools and patents and retired very comfortably so that's the story that the way we normally hear it in portrait if I may I want to go back and I want to tell you the story in landscape because you didn't hear all the facts I mean you go back to those two Russian soldiers who let my father and his family go if they didn't have enough Humanity to see the humor in my father's three-year-old bravado they would have been killed just like many tens of thousands of Jews were killed in the Soviet Union and nobody would have heard from them again they got back to Warsaw and after fleeing my father walks back into Warsaw and he finds my grandmother staying with Gentile friends those those C Catholic polls were taking their lives into their hands by having my grandmother and then my fathers stay with them if the Nazis who had occupied warsa by this point had found out that they were harboring Jews the entire family would have lost everything their lives and and their whole futures um my father got sick on the way to to um Lithuania and he had to stop in at at a a farmhouse where the the the farmer and his wife took care of my father and and nursed him back to health in fact at one point Nazis came to the door and the farm the farmer uh they said do you have any Jews here and the farmer said well no we don't um and they said can we look I said sure look around it's fine but I don't know that you want to go into that room because that's my cousin and he's got tyus this this couple risked their lives for my father and my grandmother told lies to professional Killers when my father gets to Lithuania I'd always wondered as a as a kid why Japan and why cirasa well it turns out that there was a Japanese cons uh uh diplomat in Lithuania a guy named chiun sugihara many people think of him as the Japanese Schindler because he saw these Jews um piling up and he said we have to do something for these people his his people in Japan said no we're not going to let you so against orders he wrote over 2,000 visas for my parents uh my father my grandparents and 2,000 other Jews I'd always wondered if this was the my family story when I was at the Holocaust Museum many many years ago I asked whether they had a list of the people the sugihara saved they handed it to me I saw my my father's name and my grandparents name ysep schartman gozman Alexander schartman and I just started crying I was I was I couldn't stop myself I was UNC controllably weeping my father gets to Shanghai no job it turns out that there was a large Jewish population in Shanghai who had come from the Middle East 60 or 70 years ago and they were Rich they could have seen the 20,000 Eastern European Jews who' come there as riffraff um but in fact they decided these were their lmen these were their people and they took care of them and they took care of my my father and my grandparents it was Jewish organizations that paid for my parents to come to the United States and it was Jewish organizations that found the job in Seattle they found a job in Houston they found a job in Seattle I almost grew up in [Laughter] Houston um the my father found a job with this wonderful family the roers um who gave him a job and they were they were so happy with his work that they promoted him over the sons that they had working in the business um when my father moved to Chicago the people that he sold to would send their grown children to Chicago just to see that Alex schwarzman was okay I found out you know that that the reason why my brother eded is because the company he worked for looked past the fact that he didn't have a college degree look past the fact that he spoken double negatives and realized he was brilliant and that they gave him the opportunity to have those patents my sister went to Brown University on a full ride scholarship because generations of people have been contributing to Brown University so that they have the money to to give to a a a a shy but hardworking and smart immigrant kid to to come to an IV League school I said I went to the the most expensive law school in the United States um and I always wondered how my parents afforded it I found out about 12 years ago they didn't that Ray and Janette wer my parents' boss my father's boss they paid for my college education they paid for my law school education you know that caring that moral imagination is is the reason why I am who I am where I am the reason why I'm standing here today the reason why I've had the luxury of studying this and being able to put some of these ideas together we need to tell our family stories twice everybody's family story in this in this room um is worth telling twice I don't care if you came over the and the boat if your parents came over the boat or if the boat your parents came over was the Mayflower uh everybody's family stories can be told in portrait and landscape and what you do is you find the moral imagination the communities the geographic and the historic communities that whose moral imagination whose caring is the reason why you are who you are where you are and what you're doing and when we do that when we stimulate people's attention to moral imagination we realize that we're all inevitably embedded in community that the most Libertarian of us is living an illusion that we are all when we tell our stories twice and we make sure we tell it in landscape we find out that we're all embedded in community and ultimately this allows us to to generate and to mobilize moral imagination because that's what will cause generations of people to care for not just the real and related other but but all those other more complicated others that they have to care for um and ultimately we can then stand and say we need to have leadership on behalf of that community that we're all embedded in thank [Applause] you