What drives people to commit evil actions? Is it mental disease, fanaticism-fueled terrorism, rebellion against authority? Is it the outcome of bad parenting, eroding national values, the breakdown of faith and family? Or is it something else altogether? I think there is a more fascinating question: What drives people to acts of heroism and kindness? What is it in people that drives them to put the interests and sometimes even the lives of others before their own? What force in people allows them to set aside their primal instincts for survival to care more [...]

Please don’t tell me we are going to reduce the Sandy Hook School shooting (and the several other recent cases of mass shootings) to a debate about gun control and leave it at that. Of course gun control is a central part of the debate, but we seem to do everything in our power to avoid the real problem: our unwillingness to say, “No!” to ourselves and to one another. The real problem lies at the root of American society and is responsible for more than the horrible mass shootings we [...]

The problem with change is, in fact, not change at all. Despite all we are told about how difficult it is to manage change, the truth  is that as human beings we are wired for change and get bored with monotony. Or, as the December 1st New York Times article, New Love: A Short Shelf Life by Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky puts it: “…although we may not realize it, we are biologically hard-wired to crave variety.” So if the issue with change is not the change itself, what is the problem? Most people embrace change [...]

Professor Howard Gardner wrote a vitally important piece in the New York Times Opinionator, entitled Reinventing Ethics. He questions the adequacy of existing models of ethics based on ancient teachings in a radically changed digital environment. Our contacts, both professional and personal, are no longer restricted by physical proximity, he argues, and so how can an injunction like Love your neighbor as yourself  still be relevant in a digital age? He writes: The problem with a belief in the immutability of morality is the same as the problem with a belief that the American Constitution [...]