Thursday, April 30th, 2009
Human intellectual development has eclipsed emotional development, with the resulting problem of clever people lacking morals. In government, industry, and academia there are endless examples of this problem, which is now threatening the economy due to corruption, and the very biosphere of the earth due to pollution. It is heartening that MIT (that trained most of the “Quants” who created the algorithms that floated the financial scams behind the current “global financial crisis”) today officially opens The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values, with a talk by the XIVth Dalai Lama and a benefit concert by Philip Glass.
The Center at MIT is dedicated to inquiry, to dialogue, and to the creation of programs that affect the ethical and humane dimensions of life. This nonpartisan center is a collaborative think tank focused on the development of interdisciplinary research and programs in various fields of knowledge from science and technology, to education and international relations. The Center is founded to honor the vision of the Dalai Lama and his call for a holistic education that includes the development of human and global ethics.
“We live in a time of profound change. Science and technology continue to expand our ability to understand and change life. Our impact on the environment has grown to the point that we are affecting the planet as a whole. Economies and societies can no longer be thought of separately, for they are intertwined in a global community. Our actions as individuals and as societies affect not just ourselves but our global neighbors. Now more than ever it is imperative that we contemplate and understand our relationship to and the impact of our actions on each other as individuals, as countries, and as inhabitants of our planet,” said Tenzin Gyatso, the XIVth Dalai Lama.
Individual decisions affect the economy and the environment, and regardless of your belief-system there are common values (and “secular ethics”) upon which we can base a functional system of ethics. This month, The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT will host its first public event: The Human Impact Conference. It will be an interdisciplinary forum exploring ethical responsibility in the context of a globalized economy and an environment that is vulnerable on a planetary scale. Empowered by technology and communications, the influence of human actions now reaches far beyond what traditional ethical systems have envisioned.
The conference brings together scholars, policy makers, and global leaders for a wide-ranging public dialogue that invites us to recast our understanding of the ethics of personal responsibility on a global scale and to weigh the long-term effects of choices we make today. The list of invited speakers for spring and fall 2009 include APJ Kalam, Samdhong Rinpoche, Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Wangari Mathaai, Howard Zinn, Jane Goodall, Martha Nussbaum, Betty Williams, Fr. Thomas Keating, Richard Davidson, and Daniel Goleman. -E.K.