2003 Annual Meeting Presentation

The George Hull Centre Annual General Meeting
June 16, 2003

Guest Speaker: June Callwood

Making a Difference

I want to thank Libby Ridgely and the board and staff of the George Hull Centre for including me in this year’s Annual General Meeting of an organization which is renowned for its compassion and effectiveness. An AGM is always a satisfying milestone for any agency, but particularly so for George Hull this year because you were chosen as the site for this riding’s Early Years Centre. It is sad that this government has never spent a penny on expanding regulated child care, but we have to rejoice that lots of money is being spent here and in every other riding for children who have caring care-givers at home. And that, of course, is a Good Thing.

I point out to you that both opposition parties in the Ontario Legislature have promised to create more regulated child care spaces to begin eliminating long waiting lists. So there is another Good Thing to keep in mind.

Very little in this increasingly nuthouse world makes sense to me, but I am convinced that our existence doesn’t have much point unless we accept responsibility for one another. This often is dismissed as idealism, but idealism is not a pious or silly virtue: it is a necessity if we are to hold our personal sanity together. I’d like to address that topic this afternoon with you, and to set out a view, which is one of the few pieces of wisdom I have accumulated so far, that whatever you do for yourselves in the way of learning a new skill, or giving yourself permission spend a lazy hour or two just smelling the flowers, you do for others. Unless your own life is fulfilling, you won’t have much left over to give anyone.

Your association with the George Hull Centre needs you to be as happy a person as you can manage, but it is also important that you retain the idealism that brought you here in the first place. Young people very often are idealistic because life has not introduced them to the hopelessness of most causes. As people age, idealism and altruism become more and more suspect. By their middle-years many people have decided that there is very little gain in looking out for other people; mostly, they think, it is thankless, wasted work. This simply isn’t true. My prescription for a well-lived life is not very complicated and certainly isn’t original. Simply put, one must look out for others, for one’s own sake. Essentially, that’s what all of you are doing. You care-givers are on the right path if anyone is keeping score on who is being nice, and therefore deserving of the heaven of inner quietude.

I was raised in a tiny village, where I observed that people in very small communities with few outside resources often cultivate inter-dependence rather well, because their individual survival depends on it. They take ownership of all the children, and everyone fallen ill, and the barn that needs a new roof. The fact is, we all live in many small communities which lack sufficient outside resources to sustain them unless they work from a collaborative model. A “small community” is not necessarily a village, though it can be that. It also is the dozens of identity-groups that surround each of you, some as small as oneself and a mate, some as huge as a country. These clans keep changing membership and size and category, but each is a copy of the way human beings have always lived — in a tribe. Family and close friends make up the dearest and most important of human clans; work-place associates comprise another one, and also the people seen on a regular basis, such as at a health club or at choir practice. Another is made up of childhood friends who can walk into our lives anytime and sit down for a chat. An important clan is made up of people in the same line of work, and a larger group consists of those with whom we readily identify — those of our own cultural background, perhaps, or parents of twins if we have twins, or joggers if we jog. For instance, I was an unhappy and lonely teenager, so I have never yet met an unhappy, lonely teenager I don’t bond with – that gives me a huge clan group.

Instinctively, people know that comfortable relationships with others are a way of enhancing their own well-being. In a real way, when anyone shows consideration for others that person is taking care of herself, or himself, lowering the tides of anxieties and anger that diminish well-being.

I have a caveat here, which I hope I can express well enough not to be misunderstood. Sometimes, alas, the dynamic in giving is top-down. People fail to be sufficiently sensitive to the fact that givers are in the power position, and receivers are not. Insecure people sometimes are drawn into benevolent activities because they offer a potential for the self-satisfaction of domination. They subtly make the disparity in the positions of giver and receiver abundantly clear, and therefore they fail the most elementary test for kindness, which is that both parties should feel better.

Much of what passes for help is the help that most suits the giver but reflects little empathy for the recipient. Perfectly nice people, thinking themselves generous, decide unilaterally what is best for someone else and then they are affronted if the person is not appreciative.

I am not suggesting that people should withhold the transcendent impulse to be helpful. That’s the God in your machinery. My point was best made by Hans Mohr when he said, “Help has to be defined by the person who gets it, not by the person who gives it.”

In the small village of my childhood, I grew up believing that the way the world worked was that we all look out for one another and, especially, we keep children safe. I was middle-aged before I encountered the writing of Hannah Arendt, a philosopher of great intellect. Hannah Arendt wrote a book about the trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann. He designed an efficient way to kill masses of people and his invention played a major role in the slaughter during the Holocaust of six million people, mostly Jews, but gypsies, homosexuals, labor union leaders, and people of other faiths as well. Hannah Arendt reasoned that Eichmann was evil incarnate and if she could identify what drove Eichmann she would understand the true nature of evil. She changed her mind. Eichmann was a banal company man, who zealously followed instructions and was proud of engineering skills which produced the killing chambers. He simply was couldn’t picture the consequences. What Arendt came to believe was that the real evil lay with the people who knew that those boxcars crossing the German and Polish countryside were carrying human beings to their death – those people who had that ghastly knowledge but did nothing.

Arendt concluded that there are no innocent bystanders. That’s an oxymoron. Anyone who witnesses an injustice and does not interfere is more culpable, in a significant way, than the perpetrator. And how do those of us who step over people sleeping on sidewalks, and those of us who avoid the outstretched hands of beggars differ fundamentally from those who watched the boxcars?

Maybe evil can be defined, but goodness is quite complicated. It is a puzzle to understand why some people intervene when something in their community needs to be addressed, even though it is bothersome for them to take the time, or will make them unpopular in certain segments of town, or – and this is the big deterrent to community activism – it won’t really help. There are dozens of reasons to explain why most people don’t leap into action to help others; it is much harder to understand why some people, like you in this room, do.

Who are those people? Well, for one thing their numbers of shrinking dramatically in this country. Statistics Canada reports that a mere eight percent of Canadian adults contribute half of all donations and volunteer hours. This small group was described as “the civic core.” If that core shrinks any more than it has, Stats Canada worried (as do you) what will become of the aged, the poor, the homeless, the disabled, the young.

Said a Stats Canada spokesperson, “This civic core, although small, is clearly a pillar of enormous significance in maintaining a just and mutually caring society. We would speculate that it may also have a central role in supporting democratic governance as well.” That is, if people turn away from one other to live behind walls, democracy will break down in favour of a police state. As it is now doing.

Michael Hall, CEO of the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy, recently commented that the volunteer labour force in Canada represents 549,000 full-time jobs (roughly the paid work force in Manitoba), but between 1997 and 2000 (the most recent figures available) volunteerism in Canada dropped by 31 percent. He doesn’t know why. He says, “We know something is going on, but we just don’t have the data yet.”

A few years ago Statistics Canada embarked on a peculiar plan to understand what it is that compels some people to be kind to others. The underlying premise was that society would not hang together if people really cared for no-one but themselves. Altruism is society’s glue and the work of volunteers is estimated to be worth something in the order of $17 billion a year in Canada. Stats Canada reasoned that it is not policing or social services or laws that enable our neighbourhoods to be pleasant, polite, easy-going places, it is the prevailing tone of concern for others that can make families, schools, communities, countries function effectively. The absence of such involvement leads to social unrest and isolation.

In a dog-eat-dog world, eventually everyone gets eaten.

Spurred by this concern about the decreasing level of volunteerism, Stats Canada pulled together the usual group essential to all gatherings convened by federal bureaucracies: half of us were men, half of us women, half of us francophone, half of us anglophone, a sprinkling came from the west and half a sprinkle from the Atlantic provinces. And there was one Jesuit priest (there is always a Jesuit), one aboriginal person, one environmentalist, one lawyer, one sociologist, and so on. And one of me, whatever that represented. Several days were spent in two sessions a year apart. Our assigned task was to describe what we thought moves people to be kind, and how this causative element could be encouraged to spread.

Of course we didn’t know. No, it was worse. Each of us knew but no two of us were in agreement. The lawyer said laws make people better behaved, and he wasn’t far wrong – that’s what human rights legislation is all about. The Jesuit spoke of a return to spiritual values, something he understood perfectly but many of us wandering on the Diaspora did not. The aboriginal man told a long baffling parable about a bird. My contribution was a declaration that adults who demonstrate concern for others usually were well-treated when they were babies and small children, so we could solve many societal problems in only one generation simply by giving all babies a good start. Although this happens to be true, it was received with as much enthusiasm as the parable about the bird. I realized I had been included in the colloquium as the token baby-hugger. It was no accident that I was seated next to the tree-hugger, both of us slotted in the category of the hopelessly idealistic and somewhat developmentally delayed.

We didn’t emerge from the meetings with the slightest grasp of rules that would cause human goodness to increase in Canada so that our neighbourhoods, our country, our world, would have fewer casualties. Our failure wasn’t a surprise, but all of us were disappointed. Life would be so much easier if someone would issue a road map, or instructions for assembly. What we agreed upon, however, was that kindness, call it ethical behaviour, call it simple good manners, is a powerful force in human communities. We just didn’t get the hang of figuring why a few people score very high on the altruism scale and most do not.

I’m missing a formal religion, but I am not without a theology, which is that kindness is divinity in motion. An act of appreciation, a bit of helpfulness, not only improve the tone of the day for others, and are more contagious than SARS, but kindness and appreciation are beneficial to oneself. The new science of psychoneuroimmunology is bearing this out. When we are good people, we are not only happier but also healthier. The University of Michigan recently completed a study that had an interesting outcome. People who are care-givers are healthier than people who are not. Something about helping others contributes significantly to human well-being, and when people no longer help someone, their health declines.

So everyone here this afternoon is on the right track for longevity. You are helpful people. You make room for others to grow. And by doing so, you grown yourself. You have made good deeds part of who you are. Others are in a poignant search for a way to be better persons, as soon as they can find the time. But goodness is a skill, exactly like furniture-making. People have to start simply and practice a lot in order to be proficient at consideration for others. I rejoice over the small acts of impersonal kindness that I see every day, such as when people hold the door for the stranger coming along behind. It doesn’t matter if the person doesn’t say thank you. We are not responsible for someone else’s behaviour, however rude; we are only responsible for our own. It is an important act of commitment to the ideal of collective responsibility that people hold the door for someone they don’t know and are unlikely to see again. The point is not to be awarded a medal, because there isn’t one for door-holding. Instead this ceremonial act of goodwill acknowledges the essential connectedness of strangers.

The point of taking action against the evils Gandhi identified as injustice, untruth and humbug is not that the intervention will succeed, although this is possible. The point is someone makes an effort is made to correct a wrong. That is the whole point, indeed. That’s making a difference in a profound meaningful way. You tried. Good on you.

And thanks.