Prophetic rats and the path to peace
“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”
—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Over the past two months, I have had the dubious task of commuting back and forth to diverse destinations throughout Los Angeles County. Some “traffic truisms” are now etched into my psyche.
First of all, there seems to never be a time when there is not traffic. Your GPS choices are stop or crawl. Secondly, people — no matter what time of day or day of the week — are in a hurry even when they don’t need to be. Thirdly, there are a bunch of angry drivers that will threaten your safety for one car length.
During one of my traffic odysseys, I pondered why this was so. I remembered a particular lecture in one of my high school science classes. It was about an experiment performed in the early 1960s by ethologist John B. Calhoun. He created a “rat utopia” of enclosed spaces where the rats could live and receive all the food and water their little rat hearts could dream of, enabling unrestricted population growth. Calhoun reported his findings in 1962 in the journal Scientific American, in which he chronicled the results — total societal collapse. Overpopulation resulted in societal and mental breakdowns, resulting in aggression, cannibalism, and chaos, to name a few. I pondered how his findings could translate into our present human predicament. With a little Googling on my part, I found that from around the time Calhoun published his findings to the present, not only has the World Population tripled, but the population of the State of California has tripled as well!
The California of my youth was laid back, with only a “rush hour” (literally an hour of traffic in the morning and again in the evening) to contend with. In other words, our world is becoming like Calhoun’s rat society. Societal norms and constructs are fraying. People’s nerves and emotions are on edge. Instead of thinking and acting on what is the good of all, people place their personal demands and desires as paramount. And woe unto you if you impinge upon those desires. They will wreak vengeance upon you or cancel you as if you never existed. Is there a way through all of this? How can we prevent our lives, relationships, school, and work environments from becoming Calhoun’s nightmare in a world of increasing complexity, time constraints, demands, and change?
Author and scholar Richard Rohr suggests: “Only mutual apology, healing, and forgiveness offer a sustainable future for humanity. Otherwise, we are controlled by the past, individually and corporately. We all need to apologize, and we all need to forgive, or this human project will surely self-destruct.” The apostle Paul recommends, “Never pay back evil with more evil… Do all that you can to live in peace with everyone” (Romans 12:17-18 NLT)
We can transform ourselves and our relationship with others we encounter and interact with in all the arenas of our lives — whether as students, employees, or caregivers. How? Flipping the script, returning kindness for anger, patience for intolerance, and love for hate. We change ourselves and those around us by following the ways laid out for us by Jesus, one interaction and one relationship at a time.
—Terry Swenson, DMin, is director of University Spiritual Care.
