 Friends, it's a pleasure to be here. Can everyone hear? All right with the microphone. Okay. I'll introduce the panelists in just a minute. First, I just want to sort of transition from what was a very, very powerful presentation we heard by Dr. Akavan. He offered some very sober reflections, not only on the nature of humanity, but on the nature of inhumanity. And I think that those reflections should really help us understand the urgency of the work in which we're engaged. As a community, we'd even hear in this forum at the Association for Baha'i Studies, we're not really engaging in an academic exercise. This panel, I hope you don't consider a mere academic exercise. The topic of this panel, as I hope you'll come to appreciate, really has to do with some of the found, putting some of the foundation stones in place. For the humanity, that Dr. Akavan referred to. So to set up our discussion, I want to say first a few words about this sort of new area endeavor, the House of Justices, is starting to help us anticipate entering that Pyeri referred to. Our participation in the prevalent discourses of society. Those of us who had a chance to, you know, really study the Rizwan message have become to recognize these sort of three broad areas of endeavor that we're beginning to understand some of our work within. Our expansion and consolidation work, our social action, and our participation in the discourses of society. And of course the House of Justice is urging us to strive for increasing coherence among these different areas as we wade more deeply into them. Coherence is enhanced by our ability to conceptualize our efforts. So the House of Justice has been working with us, training us in the ability to conceptualize our efforts in the expansion and consolidation work. Right? We think of these efforts now in terms of two primary movements. Four core activities that we're engaging in, a framework for action within which all the highs can begin to take initiative. Cycles of expansion and consolidation and so forth. These should be very familiar concepts to you because we've been learning to conceptualize our expansion and consolidation in these terms with this language. The ability to conceptualize our experience is a key to advancing, to generating knowledge, to refining our practice. The ability to conceptualize our experience is a key to being able to consult and take actions and reflect on those actions. This process we're all learning as we create this culture of learning. So over time we can anticipate that the same will be true of our participation in the discourses of society. As we gain more experience, we'll need to be able to conceptualize what we're doing so that we can consult. And engage in actions and reflect on our actions and refine our efforts and advance our knowledge in this area of endeavor. This is a very important aspect of coherence. Now coherence also implies that we're learning lessons from one area of endeavor that give us insights in other areas of endeavor. So for instance, through our growing body of experience in the expansion and consolidation work, we're learning about the importance of learning in action. We're learning about the importance of building capacity among increasing numbers of people to contribute to the endeavor. We're learning about the importance of systematizing our efforts. We're learning about the importance of maintaining focus across time. We're learning about the importance of developing a common vocabulary so that we can consult with one another about what we're doing. And we're learning really to work together within this evolving conceptual framework through which we understand our efforts. So let's think for a minute about how we might begin to conceptualize our participation in discourse, which is what this panel is about and how to approach this in a more coherent manner. The way I tend to think about discourse, and I think one of the simplest and most useful ways, discourse really refers to the ways that people think and talk about a given subject. That's a discourse. So for instance, there's a discourse on human rights, ways that people are thinking and talking about human rights, of which Dr. Akavan has been contributing significantly at many different levels. That constitutes a discourse. And that constitutes the type of discourse the House of Justice is pointing us towards, which is connected to social practice. So these are not just discourses that begin and end in words, but they're actually directly connected to the advancement of civilization. Discourses on the environment, on governance, on the advancement of women, and so forth. These are all examples of ways that people are thinking and talking about a subject that's connected to the advancement of civilization. If we analyze discourses, we can start to see some features that actually might help us figure out how to engage, how to participate more effectively. So for instance, a discourse can be framed in different ways. The same subject can be framed in different ways, which lead to different understandings. So in some of my own personal work, I've tried to look at the sort of contrast between frames that are essentially frames of contestation in which we think about a given area of social practice through a sort of lens or a frame of a social contest, as opposed to the frame that Baha'u'llah brought us, which is the frame of oneness, the frame of the social body, which is the analogy Baha'u'llah used. Those are two different frames that if we apply them to the same subject, we end up seeing it very differently. So this is like a feature of discourse that we can start reflecting on and maybe recognize part of our contribution in the long run as we work with others will be actually to reframe discourses in profound ways that actually change the way we think and talk about a given subject. Now as we approach this work and we look even more closely, one thing we'll notice is that frames, the way discourse is framed, it's internal framework, so to speak, right, the way it's structured. Frames are made up of many different elements in turn, which we can begin to try and analyze and think about and figure out how to engage. One of the most important elements are the underlying assumptions of the framework. So for example, assumptions about human nature, of which we'll be exploring and this entire conference is exploring. You change the underlying assumptions, the entire frame begins to change. The problem is sometimes in a given discourse, the underlying assumptions are explicit. It's easy to identify, people are talking about them. But more often than not, the underlying assumptions are implicit. They're hidden. They're not openly talked about. Sometimes people engaged in the discourse don't even recognize their own underlying assumptions. So often as we're participating in discourse, we'll find that we need to probe. We need to ask questions. We need to try and drive down to those underlying assumptions. If we want to begin to effect a sort of reframing of these patterns of thought that are so important in the world. This is the crucial point of engagement. So assumptions about human nature matter. In fact, if there's any set of assumptions that is probably the linchpin in so many important discourses, it has to be those assumptions we make about the nature of the human being. They inform patterns of thought. They inform social practices and they inform social policies. So as we're participating in the discourse of society, we'll do well to sort of continually probe these underlying conceptions of human nature to seek to clarify them, to seek to refine and advance them. Now this is not to say that as Baha'is we have sort of all the answers to the question of human nature. We don't. We have certain insights and principles that we can draw from the revelation. And Mr. Dunbar on Thursday night helped ground this conference in many of those insights and principles by engaging the revelation in a very direct manner. We also have certain experiences applying these insights and principles in our own lives, in our families, in our work, in our communities that we can also draw on. And we can contribute these insights with humility as we participate in the discourses of society. In the process we can also learn with other like-minded people how to refine and advance our own understandings of human nature. So with this posture of learning in mind and this posture of humility, let's transition into the sort of specific business of this panel then. Now I've invited four people with very different backgrounds to reflect on diverse conceptions of human nature in their own disciplines or professions. In preparation for the panel, I asked them all to think a little about five questions which will help to some extent structure some of their comments. I want to share those questions with you because they're also questions that I hope you might all begin reflecting on. Because in many ways this panel is not about providing answers but it's about raising questions and I think stimulating sort of paths of inquiry that we'll all be engaging in. So these questions I posed were first, what conceptions of human nature circulate most widely or exert the most influence within the academic or professional discourses you are familiar with? And I might add to that also the popular discourses, the discourses at the level of our neighborhood and our cluster. How do these conceptions of human nature that are circulating widely relate to Baha'i conceptions of human nature as we understand them? To what extent are dominant inherited conceptions of human nature limited, partial or sometimes entirely problematic? To what extent are these dominant inherited conceptions of human nature being challenged by emerging alternatives within those discourses that are more holistic and constructive? And how can we contribute to these discourses in ways that advance the emergence of these more holistic and constructive conceptions of human nature in partnership with others? So with that introduction let me now introduce the panelists. And I'm going to introduce them in order in which they're going to offer opening comments themselves. And I won't interject in between each one, we'll just go right down the table. Each panelist has about 10 minutes to offer some of their opening thoughts. And then after that I'm going to pose some questions and we're going to have something of a conversation or what I like to think about as a consultative inquiry into this subject. So sitting immediately next to me is Holly Hansen. Holly is a professor of African history at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Much of her teaching focuses on the history of inequality and her research focuses on the social and economic history of southern Uganda where she's explored issues regarding land use, political accountability, power and economic exchange, among other things. Next to Holly is Ryan Segal who's completing a PhD in Applied Economics at Oregon State University. Ryan, among his many interests, has concerns about the discipline of economics, dominant conceptions of value of social organization and human nature. And he's working in his studies to advance the conception of human nature based on insights from science and religion that fosters individual and social advancement as he moves through the field. Next to Ryan is Mary Kay Radpur who's a clinical social worker and an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee. She's one of the founders of the Authenticity Project, which some of you are familiar with, which provides training and moral decision making and is built upon the explication of Baha'i Ethics in Dr. William Hatcher's work and specifically his book Love, Power and Justice. And finally at the far end of the table from me is Puea Essani who's also completing a PhD in health behavior and health education at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on a physiological and sociological basis for risk behaviors in youth. He's previously worked as a youth health educator and a public health practitioner in Australia, Asia, Europe and the United States. So without any further words of introduction, I'll hand the microphone over to Holly and then we'll just proceed down the table. The first thing I'd like to say is that Michael's questions are very difficult. But let me try. Historians don't think we have theories. Historians think that what we're doing is looking at the past and we're finding legitimate valid sources about the past and from those sources we're looking at what happened. But implicit underlying assumptions about human nature that I see if I reflect on say, you know, the last 50 years of historical scholarship are these. First, human beings are subject to powerful historical forces that overwhelm us. So the growth of capitalism, the consequences of enslavement of Africans for the entire world, the processes of consolidation that we call modernization or globalization. Those things have been beyond human beings. The consequences which some of them have been negative, there wasn't anything people could do about them. We were powerless. Also, and maybe this is slightly contradictory but it's also there, human beings are intelligent and we use our intelligence and creativity to get the best for ourselves and dominate others. People will be in conflict and those conflicts will always have winners and losers. Also, human nature tends to deception. So moments that we can look at in history where we see things that might look like people trying to pursue a passion for justice such as the end of slavery can actually be explained by self-interest also. So the entire campaign that occurred in the middle and late 19th century in which people determined that slavery was abhorrent and it would end, which included really interesting sort of PR like labeling sugar, blood sugar. All of that actually succeeded because it was in the interest of the British state to not have slavery anymore because slavery wasn't good for their competition. So even where we see altruism and generosity, what's actually going on underneath that altruism and generosity is self-interest. And finally, even if people acting with what might be seen to be higher motives that aren't self-interested, they're naive and patronizing and don't really understand what they're doing, which doesn't work anyway. So my example for that is the labor movements of the late 19th century, which did in fact change the conditions of industrial work around the world. But if you look at historical scholarship about them, that historical scholarship focuses not on the motivations or the vision, but on the way that people's perception of what they wanted was grounded in a kind of limiting social reality. Okay. Let me move on now sort of to part of question two and part of question three, which is I think if we imagined historical scholarship as kind of a graph, which of course historians would never do, but if we did imagine historical scholarship as a graph with the positive dimensions of human nature here and the negative dimensions of human nature here, all the plot points on that graph of the history that people are writing are on the negative side. Now, as Baha'is, we would look at or usually trying to understand the conception of human nature that we find in the Baha'i Revelation. We would look at those plot points and not say, no, those things didn't happen. But that's not all. What else was happening? What social institutions did people create which reflected their love of God? Where were people acting on a vision of justice and a passion to implement it? When did people respond to others with generosity, selflessness, and love? Where do we see human intellect struggling to create meaning out of social conditions that don't exist, that don't make sense? Where do we see people striving to maintain social relations and conditions that conform to what they believe God would want? All of those are important questions, which the thrust of historical scholarship is not interested or it's not asking those questions. But it's really not adequate to put up some positive plot points on a landscape or a map, oops, I changed metaphors there, on a graph that has a thrust which is in a different direction. Partly because what historians are seeing is valid. If we look at 500 years, we see patterns of social processes transforming in ways that bring the lower nature of humanity to the fore. So we're going to look naive and we are going to be naive and kind of uninformed to say, oh, but look at those guys. They wanted something else. The answer to that would be so what? What we need in order to move forward in expanding the sense of human nature that this field is looking at is an idea with greater explanatory value than human beings have higher qualities as well as lower ones. And I think we find that in another aspect of Baha'i ideas about human nature, which is we don't believe just that human beings have the capacity to be good. We believe that transformative processes of education that enable us to regulate our lower nature and enable us to draw out our higher capacities are essential for those to be realized. You know, Baha'u'llah didn't say a man is a mind full of gems of inestimable value and they're actually on the surface, just pick them up. So what the revelation offers to someone who wants to think about history is a different set of questions which would be what are, I have these questions written down and it will be more interesting if I actually read them to you. What are those structures? What where in human history have people created those structures which really show the dynamic coherence of material and spiritual reality? How did those structures work? When they began to fail, what was it that made them fail? What were the systems of moral economy that structured the dynamic relationship of material and spiritual components? When they stopped functioning, how did they stop functioning? How did formal and informal practices of education serve or not serve to regulate the lower nature of human beings? And these are historical processes. We can track them over time in different societies in different ways. And there's some recent historical scholarship that asks these kinds of questions. A really fascinating book on slavery in Madagascar which shows how people, as slavery was introduced, how people get drawn in and the kinds of moral questions they asked and the moral debates they had as slavery began in that society. Also on slavery in Congo, a scholar who shows that people thought of slavery as a disease and what the society needed to do was to inoculate themselves against the disease of enslavement by having everyone together commit to neither accepting to own a slave or to sell a slave. The most cited essay in historical scholarship of the last 50 years is E.P. Thompson's The Moral Economy of the English Crowd. And there's somewhat more that scholarship that exists in the field of history that we can cite as in SITE in which we can place these kinds of questions if we wanted to ask them. But basically, I think the potential that exists for us is to take the statements about what is true religion. What structures are created by true religion in society? How are those structures created? What do societies look like when they have them? And how do societies lose them? And if we ask those kinds of questions, we can put ourselves into this landscape and take it from where it is into a place that includes a broader human nature in a way that will make sense to the people we're trying to communicate with. Thank you, Holly. Can you hear me? Yeah, okay. So like Holly, I also felt very challenged with these questions and it's very difficult, especially as an economist, because different people have different conceptions of what economics is. And so I always feel compelled, you know, I'm doing my PhD. I have to make sure that everybody's on the same page about what it is. Oftentimes when I talk with people, people are like, oh, you're studying economics. So tell me, where should I invest my stocks, you know? And I'm like, ah, sorry, I'm a resource environmental economist. And they're like, what's that? So I just want to start off with a little bit of context so we understand where I'm coming from and kind of the ideas that I'm sharing. So economics is a topic that's researched from a variety of angles and a variety of disciplines with very different assumptions and very different theoretical language with which to explore it. The economics that I've been trained in is usually called neoclassical, kind of mainstream economics. And I feel has a pervasive influence on the social sciences overall for a variety of reasons. And even within this neoclassical tradition, there are many, many applications of the theory. For example, it's applied to finance, like the stock market, but it's also applied to other issues such as environmental issues, resources. Even nowadays, there's education economics, which looks at how do we optimize our educational systems, even health economics, where they're applying the same theoretical foundation to solve policy problems at that level. So what is economics? The word economics means management of the household. And so in this case, the household is usually a country or the world or whatever level we're talking about. You'll see kind of different definitions, but I would summarize it into just two things. Economics, for me, is the science of decision making. Economics tries to explain how people and institutions make decisions and should make decisions, and also for the benefit of the whole. It's actually very lofty, the aim of economics. So we have examples. Sometimes economists study markets, so they want to understand how do people make production decisions, how do firms decide what to produce, how do individuals decide what to consume, and how does the market structure affect this process? Whole economies are studied about wealth, distribution, and generation. And then there are four aspects to the discipline that I want to highlight, because at each of these levels, it really influences the conversation. At the core is the theory, economic theory in the neoclassical sense, is explored using mathematics. It's the language of choice. And then of course we need to translate that math into something we can all talk about, so that we can make decisions, so we do use words like I'm using right now. And so you kind of go from a very abstract concept, which is mathematical, and then you have to attach to that a theoretical construct. And it's very important to differentiate between those two things. And sometimes those two are very quickly conflated, and we reach conclusions a little too quickly. Another level of influence is the methodological choice. The tool of choice that economists use to explore reality is statistics, and you might have heard the term econometrics. And econometrics takes from theory to know what variables should it include in its analysis, and it tries to understand how one or several variables affect another, to put it very simply. And we use a lot of data to do that, hopefully. And then how does this carry into the world of action? The tools and the instruments that economics has are policies such as taxes, mandates, creating markets, etc. And perhaps at the most subtle level, which is the level I'll be talking about mostly, is how the thinking in economics affects people's perspective of the world. How does it affect the other social sciences? How does it affect our description of the world, and therefore our relationship with it? So some of the things that I say might come across as a little hypercritical, I'll try to be measured. But I think what I see over and over again in my conversations with people of different disciplines is I keep on seeing, oh my gosh, that's an economic concept. Like when I talk to my friends in conflict resolution or public health. And not just in disciplines, but in people's everyday conversations, it's really remarkable how these assumptions are. Identical to some assumptions in economics. So I'd like to start with this quote from Baha'u'llah where he says, is not the object of every revelation to affect a transformation in the whole character of mankind. A transformation that shall manifest itself both outwardly and inwardly, that shall affect both its inner life and external conditions. And then we'll return to this quote as we reflect on some of these assumptions. Two main assumptions that economics makes that there are a lot, we could talk about a lot, but is how individuals are represented and how society is represented. At a very simple level, individuals are represented as maximizing utility, which is a very broad, admittedly broad concept. And society is basically seen as an aggregation of individuals. And these are simplifying assumptions that have helped economists understand a variety of things and led to very helpful policies. But there are limitations. One is that interdependence of utility functions, for example, between individuals. So if Holly is happy, it doesn't affect my happiness in an economic framework, although there is an emerging literature on this idea. But perhaps at the most subtle level, which a lot of people are struggling to find a language to express from different angles, often non-economists, is that the model reduces the human experience to pure logic or to pure reason, which is a very profound concept with a lot of implications. But a couple of them is that there is no difference in an economic framework between means and ends. Even though from a human perspective we can feel a difference and in fact our conception, for example, of money as a means versus money as an ends would actually change our behavior. From an economics perspective, there really is a conflation of these two concepts because the topology, the structure of the mathematics that we choose to use doesn't really allow for that. Another one is needs and wants, which is very difficult to distinguish between, but the writings shed light that we should actually consider the difference between these two. This social representation also gives rise to the notion that really society, since it's just an aggregate of opinions, it's just this aggregate, the sea of opinions that are incommensurate. And there's no level of social aggregation, although there are emerging theories that are discussing this. And so an implication of this is often that competition is the organizing principle. So this really emerges from this atomistic conception of human nature and a lack of interdependence with both each other but also institutions, social, cultural, etc. And at that level also is the invisibility of community. Where is the community in the economic model? One example that I'm reading about right now has to do with how the emergence of insurance, which has an interesting history. In the past when there was no insurance, people would look out for each other and the community would raise a barn raising. We've all heard of this idea. And what happened is that this was replaced with insurance, which was in the name of efficiency. But what also ends up happening is that this barn raising was also a cultural institution. And so then this was removed from the community and with another institution. And I don't want to be all critical about that and I don't know really where these questions lead. But it's interesting to note that every economic transaction is also a social transaction. And economics really separates the two and it almost makes the social invisible. And there's a lot of writing about this. So not everything is bad with the economic framework. It does lend insight on things, for example, the importance of trust, even cooperation, albeit from a self-interested perspective. The importance of public goods and also highlights the importance of long-term resource management. So there are a lot of really benefits that have come out of economic theory, but it's worth noting the limitations so that we can practice it in a healthy way. Probably, though, at the core is the conception of human nature as static and not dynamic. We know in the writings that the purpose is to affect this kind of transformation. And transformation is not just a change in preferences, which is how an economist could depict it. That's the concept they could use to depict the change. But it's more than just a shift in preferences. It has to do with the role of the improvement of character, which there is really very limited space for in economics. There is no need for that. And the interdependent nature of us with each other in society. So how do we move forward? A few ideas. One has to do with refining our theory, exploring the metaphor of humanity as a body, which is repeatedly referred to in the writings. Also, the way we even practice social sciences, to what effect are we doing interdisciplinary work. And a question that I have is, how do we generate knowledge about society in a way that doesn't define it statically, but spiritually evolutionary? So a dynamic conception that doesn't limit what we can become. So those are some ideas. My name is, let's see, I don't know if you can hear me. My name is Mary Kay Rodpour. I'm a clinical social worker from Chattanooga, Tennessee. And although occasionally I will teach at the university, the vast majority of the time I spend my time in my office, realizing that the conversations I have at the university can't be had in my office. One day I said to a lady, I said, I think you're feeling ambivalent. And she said, huh? Okay. So I'm very aware that the conversations I have in my day to day experience have to plumb this question of what are people thinking? What is their idea of who they are? What is their idea of who they are going to become? And what's my job in connection with this? And actually some of this, I was just reflecting on all of this, how I could convey some of this here today. And I was reminded of a story about Mullah Nasreddin. I know that in this audience there are a great many people who know about Mullah Nasreddin, those of you who don't, need to know that he's a character in Iranian popular culture who is famous for the slips in logic that he manifests as. And one of the stories about Mullah Nasreddin is that he is a man walks into a room and he sees Mullah Nasreddin underneath the window walking back and forth looking at the floor. And he says to Mullah Nasreddin, what are you doing? And he says, I lost my wallet and the man says, well perhaps I can help you. So he goes and walks along the window and he looks at the floor and he doesn't see any wallet. And he says finally to Mullah Nasreddin, are you sure that you lost it here? And Mullah Nasreddin says, no, I lost it over there. And he says, well if you lost it over there, why are you looking here? And he says, Mullah Nasreddin says you fool, there's more light here. Now, how does this story about Mullah Nasreddin relate to this issue of rethinking human nature? Well in my sense of it is that sometimes we're looking in the places where there's the most light but not in the places that require the most attention or that logically would educate us the best. And I believe that for many people the answer is in their own hearts. The answer to the dilemmas in front of them doesn't really require an academic education. It requires simple listening, paying attention to what's happening. I saw a man recently who told me that he had four teenage sons as a result of a marriage to somebody who already had two sons. He had four sons between the ages of 15 and 17. And one of them had recently used his father's PayPal account to pay for $2,600 worth of gaming on the internet. And this man came in to see me because he was having dreams about a woman who had been his lover 20 years ago. And he was feeling disloyal to his wife because of these dreams. And he felt conflicted because they were disturbing him. But he didn't feel he could tell his wife because he felt that would distress her if she knew that he was dreaming about someone that he had known 20 years ago. And of course he was asking me, why am I dreaming about this woman that I knew 20 years ago? And I said, well, if I had four teenage sons, one of whom had stolen $2,600 from me, I might be dreaming about somebody I knew 20 years ago too. And he said, really? Really? I said, yeah, it strikes me that in your dream there's an important wish being articulated. So I work in this domain really where it's not so much theoretical propositions about reality, about what a human being is. It's actually experience and reflection that opens the door to understanding reality. Some years ago, if you'll allow me to share a story, it was one of those moments when out of the mouths of babes comes an insight that then you keep forever. My daughter was talking with her then three year old about the fact that in their house when you wrote with magic markers on paper, you needed to put down a big piece of paper underneath the paper because the magic marker leaked and it made marks on the floor. And she said, you see, there's a mark on the floor and that's why we're going to do this. And my granddaughter then looked at that mark on the floor and she said, I didn't do it. And her mama, who's a very wise mama said, honey, it isn't, I'm not talking about who did it. I'm talking about what we're going to do tomorrow. We're going to put paper underneath that so that doesn't happen again. And then Tara looked at it and she said, oh, mommy, I did it. I got ink on the floor. And her mama said, that's all right. It was an accident. You didn't get ink on the floor on purpose. So that's why we'll put paper underneath it. But Tara, she said, I want to tell you how proud I am that you told me the truth. And then she said, it's hard to tell the truth, isn't it? And then Tara sighed. Yes. She said, because when you see what you have done, you are so sad and you wish it wasn't you. Now, what Tara was articulating is what I hope all the 55-year-old men who sit in my office reflecting on their actions would understand is that when you see what you have done, you feel sad and you wish it wasn't you. How do I wrap all this? I'm going to put this all together. I promise. There was, in 1843, a man who was a foreman of a railroad crew by the name of Phineas Gage. And if any of you have studied basic psychology, you may remember that Phineas Gage was using a tamping iron to place a charge in a hole in the ground. When accidentally the charge went off and the tamping iron went up through the cheekbone and out through the top of Phineas Gage's head. And miracle of miracles, he not only recovered, but he actually, you know, went about his life. He continued to go about his life. But the example that was left about Phineas Gage has promoted a lot of very useful study and inquiry in the field of psychology. Because one of the things that happened to Phineas Gage is that his capacity to learn was profoundly disturbed by what had happened to his forebrain in the process of having this accident. And one thing that had occurred is that he had lost the ability to love the right answer to a question and to hate the wrong answer. He had lost what Tara had, which is the ability to look at what you've done and feel sad. And then to know next time not to do it. So the contemporary psychologist and neurologist and like Antonio De Massio, who's written a wonderful book really about the construction of the human mind, he argues that this capacity to love and hate, which we have in popular thinking about psychology, have thought that the emotions were destructive, that they led us to do irrational things and that cognition free of emotion was a good deal. That actually has now become turned on its head by the thinking about the circumstances of Phineas Gage. That Phineas Gage in fact, because he could not, what is it? Animals know, but human beings know that they know. Human beings feel, but we also know that we feel. And the process of knowing that we feel is one of the things that makes us distinctly human. And without that capacity we are hindered and hampered in the world. Now, it's my belief that, yes, one minute left to put this together. When I was a youth, I remember hearing a young Hossein Danish give a talk at the Bahá'í Center in my community, in which he quoted a passage of the Bob, which is in the Four Valleys. It's the one in which the Bob says, Let them not be like those who have forgotten God, whom he hath therefore caused to forget their own selves. And I remember the day I heard those words, it was like a lock, a key put in a lock in the door open. I thought, oh my God, that's why all the people I know who are struggling with their lives are in trouble, because they don't know who they are. I guess that's a good place to finish. Hello. Okay, so I'll be speaking about perspectives of human nature from a public health approach. And I'm just going to walk you through the different ways I'm going to cover this because public health is a more applied field, so I'm going to just pick and choose a few examples. So the first way I'm going to unpack the way public health approaches human nature is to look at how the public health community defines health. The second way is by way of how the public health community writes and thinks about health behavior theory. The third way is through approaches to regulation and policy. And finally is the way in which we conceive of the role of the individual within society. And as we go through all of these, we'll see that the public health community doesn't have a coherent way in which they think about human nature, but rather there are a few freely floating patterns of thought and sometimes these overlap and sometimes they don't. But before we start, I'm just going to tell you a little bit about what public health is. Basically the core public health functions are to assess and monitor the health of communities and populations, to formulate policies that address health problems and to ensure that all people have access to health care and preventative services. So that's basically what we do and it operates at the population level. Now the way I like to actually tell my family what public health is and like my grandma is that public health is everything we do outside of the human body that keeps us healthy. Now there are obviously other things like vaccinations that we jab people with needles with, but largely it's outside of the body. So first things first, what is the mission of public health? The mission of public health is to fulfill society's interests in assuring the conditions in which people can be healthy. That's what we aim to do, assure the conditions in which people can be healthy. But depending on how you define health, then those conditions are going to be different, right? So as we heard in the indigenous panel yesterday, what does it mean to be healthy? How do we define health? Does health incorporate a spiritual dimension? These questions aren't answered. The World Health Organization though defined health as a complete state of physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease. Now this definition has been debated a lot since it was proposed 50 years ago because of exactly the question of what well-being really is. Now what's interesting is that in 1998 the World Health Organization revised the definition and they said that health is a dynamic state of physical, mental, spiritual and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity, but this definition wasn't adopted by the countries of the world. And the debate on what health is continues to occupy the minds of public health practitioners but only on the fringe of the discipline. What I find fascinating is that we're all really busy trying to make people healthy but we actually don't agree or actually find unity on what health is. Now if we turn to the disciplines within public health at a typical school of public health you'll find a range of different disciplines. You'll find epidemiology, biostatistics, health policy and health economics, environmental health sciences and health behavior and health education. And the least respected and the lowest in the hierarchy of all these is health behavior and health education and that's the work that I do. Now it's very, it's little respected for a number of reasons partly because it comes from a social science background but also to be perfectly honest the health education field hasn't had a great deal of success in promoting and advancing the health of the population. And part of the reason for this is because the health education models and theories that we employ don't encompass a comprehensive view of human reality and they've been as a result unable to consistently tap the roots of human motivation. Broadly speaking health behavior theories approach human motivation in two ways. You act because you're scared or you act because you're worried about what others think of you. Now this is actually valid because I do act sometimes because I'm scared and I also act sometimes because of what I think of like I don't normally wear ties for example but today I thought I wondered what you would all think of me if I can. So I wore a tie. So you see it does in fact impact the way we act. There's no question that these are powerful human motivators but not everything we do can be explained according to these two motivators. And so there is one exception to this. There is a widely used health behavior theory called social cognitive theory which recognizes the human capacity for self awareness, self discipline and self regulation which we believe basically are the powers of the higher self. Now I think that health behavior theory represents an area where a more complete perspective on human nature could have profound implications for the way we practice public health and the majority of health behavior theories originate from fields other than health such as psychology or economics as was mentioned and an interdisciplinary approach would enhance efforts to share the Baha'i perspectives on human nature in the field. So partly because health education efforts haven't been an overwhelming success the public health community employs the use of regulation and policy to good ends. We might ban something or tax something here or subsidize something with the aim of creating the structures in which healthy choices can be made and this strategy has actually been used with remarkable success and some of the most prominent public health success stories come from the use of regulation such as tobacco control or the reduction in motor vehicle crashes. These are all through regulation and in the Baha'i writings we also see a role for regulation and structures that basically constrain our choices or basically I'll leave it at that and we'll talk about that more later but unless we couple regulation with the belief that the human being has the capacity to develop and transform through education which is what has been mentioned consistently then there is a pitfall which public health often falls into of thinking that human behavior and human character is entrenched and incorrigible and only responds to incentives and punishments. Also there are limits to how much you can regulate people's behavior right you can't have a policy for everything and regulation has to be coupled with individual and community empowerment. Finally I'm just going to cover the idea of how public health conceives the individual within society and this is an interesting view that the public health community has partly because of the nature of infectious diseases and the way they move through populations. The field of public health has for a long time operated on the premise that individuals in a community are connected analogous to the world of humanity representing the cells of a single body. More recently this recognition has been extended to the study of non-communicable diseases like heart disease and cancer and emerging disciplines and methods explicitly take into account the interconnectedness of people in time and place and the fact that humans can't be separated from their environments and this is another field where again insights from the Baha'i writings can be joined where we could develop a more complete view of human nature and that's really all I have to say. It's the first time a speaker has ever concluded on a two minute warning in my entire academic experience. Thank you. I think we've heard some very rich and diverse insights from many different perspectives that can assist us as we begin to reflect on how we can engage these assumptions and conceptions about human nature. I'll pose a couple of questions and we'll have time for some conversation but first the program is running a little bit behind schedule and the program convener before I came up said that we had some time to go maybe to about 12.45 but the children who are being taken care of in the children's program will still need to be picked up at 12.30 if that understanding is correct. So if you have children in a children's program you should use the next five minutes to slip out quietly try not to maybe disrupt the remainder of the program and pick up your children and we'll try and conclude around 12.45. Does that sound right Kim? 12.40, 12.40, okay. So I woke up this morning with thought about how to sort of maybe structure some of the conversation and to do that I want to read a sentence out of the RISWON 2010 message in which the House of Justice comments on conceptions of human nature that we encounter in the world around us and our response to them. They write in if you want to look this up in the future it's in the 16th paragraph where they're beginning to talk about the spiritual empowerment of junior youth and they say while global trends project an image of this age group as problematic lost in the throes of tumultuous physical and emotional change unresponsive and self-consumed the Baha'i community in the language it employs and the approaches it adopts is moving decidedly in the opposite direction seeing in junior youth instead altruism an acute sense of justice eagerness to learn about the universe and a desire to contribute to the construction of a better world so in the first half of that sentence the House of Justice is outlying widely held conceptions about human nature in this case about the nature of humans of a specific age junior youth and in the second half of the sentence they're offering an alternative conception and they're articulating it so that if we're not yet clear we also need to become clear about this conception but then we need to find ways of introducing this conception in our discourses at the level of the neighborhood the cluster not to mention even in our professions and so forth especially those of us who are working in some way with junior youth so I want to use that example from the raison message to sort of bring this discussion down to the level of our neighborhoods which is where all of you can certainly share in with the reflection and draw direct connections and if we have time we'll bring it back up a little bit to maybe the professional and academic discourses so I just want to pose a question to the other panelists what other conceptions of human nature are we encountering in our discussions and conversations in our neighborhoods, in our communities popular conceptions through the media perhaps that inform some of them to think a little bit about what are some of those prevalent conceptions and how might we engage those what might we have to offer who might we collaborate with in our efforts to sort of help refine those conceptions Mary Kay please I think a very dominant conception is that people are divided into good people and bad people and that if for example our Baha'i community is going to undertake its commitment to junior youth in the way that the House of Justice is calling for us to do the first misconception that must be cleared away is that we will find the good children to participate in our junior youth activities and we will somehow free ourselves from the bad ones and therefore we will build up something amazing with the good ones this simply is not reality and how we have sustained this notion that there are good people and bad people and that we will just work with the good ones the only way we can sustain that is by lying about the ones that we know well who are having trouble so really what we have to then understand in a very powerful level is that working every kind of problem that exists in the human community out there is here and that the wisdom that we give to it here is the wisdom that will cure it there I would say that the vast majority of people who I talk to and actually find this type of reasoning in my own mind as well is like we often segregate the inherent good and bad qualities within us and generalize so when I talk to my peers and my colleagues the prevalent notions at work are that everyone is self-interested and selfish and yet they will manifest kindness and generosity and sacrifice within certain contexts so I think there is this conflicted or almost schizophrenic approach to notions of human nature that we all hold there is not a coherent idea that these are really aspects of the single human reality and we have the potential to turn the mirror it's that no there is this little bit here and this little bit here I would also say there is more of a discourse nowadays around especially with everything that has been happening with the economy more and more people even like Amartya Sen for example are talking about the role of values in the establishment of markets and their effective functioning and I think sometimes just like Puyo was saying is that some things are being done which are in fact from a high perspective spiritual but they're not named that way and we don't develop a framework around it in a language that's inclusive of it and instead it's eclectic I think a fundamental assumption which I often see is the Maslow's hierarchy of needs which economics really kind of embraces it I think because of it's seeming value neutrality but what ends up happening is that there is this assumption that there is no need to develop the higher nature in man that you satisfy all the basic needs first and then you can do whatever you want and so going from that conception of human nature and not seeing the spiritual as an option but seeing it as a fundamental part of human existence and how it actually contributes to our health how it actually contributes to a healthier economy how it contributes to reduced conflict in a community our discourses that people are engaging in and that we can encourage sometimes just by saying oh so that I mean I don't know what words we use sometimes but oh that is a spiritual reality and just teasing out sometimes the causal relationship for people and then people are like oh yeah I guess so and then the subtle thing underlying this whole thing is how the reality of man is his thought and if we change the way we think about something all of a sudden our behavior starts to change and I see this repeatedly in the experience with the empowerment program that when junior youth all of a sudden I was working with the junior youth and she was trying to say something and I said so you're talking about being patient and I don't know that she really tagged that word with the concept that was sort of emerging and when she finally did I could see kind of this relief like ah yes and I said that's a spiritual quality and then I named that and then she saw that this was real it's not just a fleeting tendency which is actually disconfirmed in a society which has a fragmented perception of reality and if the junior youth empowerment program hadn't been there she would have lived her life with this thought that oh it's just ephemeral sometimes you feel like you're generous but if you identify it as a spiritual quality which we all develop it all of a sudden has a very different normative structure in our behavior and I'm sure from a more psychological perspective there's more to that but I've seen that. I want to pick up on what Ryan said and point out a theme that I saw emerge and in answer to your question I would have said powerlessness that people really believe and talk about how there's nothing they can do in so many different realms and I noticed and also I learned this phrase yesterday on Thursday from Nava about an architecture of choice and it seems to me that everyone talked about choice or lack of choices so part of what economists might do and is help people understand the choices that they have differently or make more choices and in terms of personal psychological health if people recognize that they have choices which they deeply believe they don't have then they could take them and part of what public health is trying to do is to limit or structure people's choices so that they choose healthy things and it seems to me that perhaps one of the ways that we can think of what the House of Justice is asking us to do and inviting us to do with communities is to show people or give people a different architecture of choices so that junior youth who feel that they're powerless because they feel that their choices are going to them all or playing games that architecture changes and they could also choose to do service and choose to develop in certain ways so that's just a thought that seemed to me carried all the way across We only have a few minutes left so what I want to do is close a session with questions that I'm posing to all of you to take beyond this session and maybe begin sort of expanding these conversations that we're having here throughout the conference of course but also beyond and I want to sort of bring this back to what I started my introductory comments on which is the coherence that we're striving to achieve between the work we're going to begin to be doing in this participating in discourses of society and the insights and lessons we're already learning through our accumulating experience in the expansion and consolidation work so one question I think we need to ask ourselves is as we participate in the discourse of society for instance around these conceptions of human nature what sort of tone and posture do we bring to this we've learned a lot in the field of expansion and consolidation about the failure of argumentation for instance as an effective method about the need to seek out receptive souls to work with others who are willing and like-minded and to erase the boundaries between the Bahá'í community and all those others in the world who are contributing to advancement of civilization alongside of us so I think in that area of learning about tone and posture and so forth is a lot to be worked out in the area of discourse still but there's a kernel of essential insights we need to begin to apply so how do we approach participation in the discourse of society in our professions, in academia, in the United Nations through the external affairs work in our local clusters and communities and what nature of our relationships and our tone and our engagement will we need to adopt another thing we're learning in the area of expansion and consolidation is the essential importance of working in teams that teams are the unit really that contribute to the generation of knowledge and insight and practical learning teams are the unit within which consultation, action and reflection make sense how does one consult by themselves in an action-reflection cycle but what will this concept of teams mean as we begin to participate in discourse how do we work with others in other words engage processes of consultation, action and reflection in a given space as we engage a particular discourse over time another area of insight that raises questions I think has to do with what are the other elements of the conceptual framework we will need to begin to develop over time that structures our contributions to discourse so if conceptions of human nature are maybe one of those core concepts those core elements of a framework that will emerge what are the other elements that will need to begin clarifying and articulating another important question of course has to do with our motives as we participate in discourse and the House of Justice very specifically referred to this in the RISWON message and warned us in no uncertain terms that we do not bring the same motives to this area of endeavor as we do to the expansion and consolidation work but there's a lot to be worked out still in terms of the relationships between these three areas in our minds a set of questions we need to begin grappling with so I just want to close by thanking the panelists who I think all offer very rich insights there are many many of you in the audience who could just as easily have been on this panel because we have among us a fabulous wealth of insights I look forward to hopefully hearing more from you there is a follow-up session to this panel for those of you who are interested to expand the conversation and bring more of you into it this afternoon at 4 p.m. in the Georgia Bee Room so people are welcomed to attend that if they want and I'll just the last thing I want to say then next to this last set of comments people were talking on if we think about conceptions of human nature what we find in so many fields is our caricatures of human nature and I say caricatures because they're elements of truth to them of course what characters do is they reduce down to a set of features that they then exaggerate right? that's a caricature it's a reduction and an exaggeration of features that are nonetheless real so as we engage in so many discourses and we begin to sort of probe and try and uncover the conceptions and assumptions about human nature sometimes what we'll find are these caricatures I think we need to be careful how we engage them first we don't want to dismiss the features that they are actually pointing to that are real Dr. Akavan I think in his comments this morning reminded us in a very sobering way of the reality of our inhumanity right? of the play of power and self-interest of the depravity to which the human soul can lower itself so we need to acknowledge and not be naive as we engage others in discussions of human nature but we also need to recognize the limitations and the exaggerations of these caricatures and it's part of our job then is to fill in the missing lines to complete the picture to refine the conception and it happens at every level even in the most basic everyday use of language think about the expression oh that's just human nature what sort of behavior preceded that expression it was a self-interested behavior a greedy behavior some expression of the lower nature which is then followed, rationalized, dismissed by the expression oh that's just human nature so these caricatures have instantiated themselves not only in our minds but even in our language at a profound level and there's an enormous amount of work that we have in front of us then to refine our conceptions refine our use of language in these ways as part of a contribution to the advancement of civilization so we'll close on that note and I look forward to conversations with many of you through the remainder of the conference and thank you again to our panelists