Still Time to Be Holy

Wow, today I saw Linda Caviness in a fight for credibility. She was on a panel discussing social intelligence in the wake of Dr. Daniel Goleman’s two presentations. A director of nurse anesthetist training took her to task as not being scientific. “You talk of oxytocin as being the trust hormone. Well, it’s also called the love hormone, and men don’t have much of it. Does that make men incapable of love? We give women Pitocin, which really just oxytocin, after birth to slow bleeding. Men don’t use this stuff in their bodies. Can we not be trusted? The problem is that some “researchers” in “brain science” take things too far. They over-generalize.”

 

Linda responded with a poignant story of how in a UC Berkley class on diagnosing and treating reading difficulties, the Harvard-grad professor asked, “If you had to boil this all down to one thing, what would that be? What one thing would make you the most effective, give you the most success?” The class sat quiet.

Linda pondered all the things they had learned and tried to extract some common denominator that would be most helpful to teachers of young reading students. Since no one else was hazarding a guess, she ventured, “Love. That’s the most basic tool we have.”

The professor turned on her and said, “Well, Miss Goody-two-shoes, do you have any more Pollyanna philosophy to share with us?”

Back then she felt attacked and stunned, but on stage today she finished the story by addressing the nurse-training director with, “That was 1980. Dr. Goleman didn’t publish his work until 1995. Because of his work, today many people would agree with me.” I think she was implying that it is worth pursuing a science of love and decency even if that science is emerging and incomplete.

On the same panel, all panelists agreed that the one biggest factor that blocks us from being the emotionally intelligent people we could be is time. Dr. Bailey stated that religion suffers without time. Some scientists try to find the “God spot” in the mind, but it will not be found. There is no righteousness gene, no moral epigenome. Instead, when things work well, we are still free to devote them to good, or not.

To further make his point about time, Bailey continued, “Time, quiet time, is a problem-solving marker. Just before a brain makes a leap to some wild new solution, it goes totally quiet. You can observe it, and you can predict what is coming. The brain always goes quiet before a sudden burst of activity.” He went on to look at the Sabbath rest as a possible explanation as to why students at Andrews score higher on self-moderation (lower at-risk behavior) than university students at large. He also wondered if the studies showing caffeine as an inhibitor of emotional intelligence were actually catching two symptoms of the same thing: lack of time. “Our society is so rushed it uses caffeine, AND it doesn’t do well in places where E.I is needed.”

So perhaps to unlock righteousness in the human mind we need not so much science as we need unhurried time. “Be still, and know.”