Sabbatical Experiment #2: SDG Academy Courses

Learning how to save the world

January 1, 2021, marked a reset for me. I’d left my corporate job and started my sabbatical a month earlier. During that first month off, I took a solo trip to the redwoods, began volunteering with Meals on Wheels, and cautiously celebrated a muted holiday amidst a local Covid spike.

The new year was an opportunity to set intentions and establish new habits for my sabbatical and the next phase of my life. A New Year’s journal prompt asked me to write down one thing I’d like to develop in the coming year. I wrote:

I would like to develop a consistent learning habit.

Before leaving my job, I had some ideas of skills I intended to cultivate during this time off. Some were based on interests and growing my knowledge for a potential future career. I wanted to become more conversational in Spanish. I wanted to learn to code in Python to deepen my technical and analytical prowess. However, my time in the redwoods compelled me first to focus on spiritual nourishment.

Leaving the corporate world opened my eyes to how much I viewed things through a capitalistic lens. Every project, every business decision, nearly every conversation focused on ROI (return on investment). I lived in spreadsheets analyzing cost vs. benefit.

I came home screaming on the inside: “What is the return on investment in the human spirit?!?”

Ancient redwoods don’t care about your spreadsheets

To regain my moral vocabulary I began searching for online ethics courses. I found one on edX called “Ethics in Action” that was starting immediately (turns out it was open enrollment). The course was free, but I signed up for a low-cost “verified” version to hold myself accountable.

I didn’t realize I’d signed up for a course focusing mostly on religion. In my first newsletter, I said my relationship with work was complicated. That was nothing in comparison with my relationship to religion.

I grew up deeply immersed in a religious community. We were a strange flavor of Catholic, part of the Catholic Charismatic renewal. It blended Catholic faith a style of worship more typical of Pentecostals. Think praying in tongues, being slain in the spirit, dancing and clapping during worship songs. I went to our community’s school, a daily 48-mile round-trip commute, from 3rd-10th grade. We went to our local parish for mass, to our community’s weekly Sunday prayer meeting, and often Saturday youth events. It was my entire life until the age of 15.

By 10th grade, I grew increasingly rebellious and disillusioned by our community and school’s authority figures. I was tired of the fear of hell, the school principal threatening to take a scissors to the long bangs hanging in my face, and calling me a slut for wearing a form-fitting red dress on the one day we didn’t have to wear a uniform. I felt stifled by judgment and forced conformity. I turned my back on it, moving to public school for my last two years, only going to church when forced. That forced attendance ended the summer I finished high school, and leaving home for college at 17. I’ve only since been back to church for weddings and funerals.

I hadn’t realized the ethics course I signed up for mainly focused on the role of religious communities in building a more just and sustainable world. I was resistant to the idea but decided to proceed.

About the SDG Academy

“Ethics in Action” was created by the SDG Academy, the educational initiative of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network. The Academy was created to globally distribute knowledge related to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). I am a bit embarrassed that prior to taking this course, I had never heard of the SDGs. The UN established these 17 goals in 2015 as a 15-year “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face, including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice.”

The SDG Academy makes 40 MOOC (massive open online courses) available for free of cost on edX’s platform. The courses are a combination of PDF reading tests, external website resources, original video content, and writing reflections.

Ethics In Action

The course started with a focus on Pope Francis and his Laudato Si encyclical. I would have scoffed if you told me a few months earlier that my sabbatical learning journey would begin with the Pope. As I began to read, I found myself nodding and cheering to many of the ideas in the text:

“But a sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly. We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves.”

“Today’s media do enable us to communicate and to share our knowledge and affections. Yet at times they also shield us from direct contact with the pain, the fears and the joys of others and the complexity of their personal experiences. For this reason, we should be concerned that, alongside the exciting possibilities offered by these media, a deep and melancholic dissatisfaction with interpersonal relations, or a harmful sense of isolation, can also arise.”

“Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”

“Men and women of our postmodern world run the risk of rampant individualism, and many problems of society are connected with today’s self-centred culture of instant gratification.”

“If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this, and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything. Otherwise we would simply legitimate the present situation and need new forms of escapism to help us endure the emptiness.”

While I don’t agree with the Pope on many items, I was inspired by this encyclical and read it front to back.

The course gives a history of the UN’s SDGs and lays out the moral practical limits of global capitalism. A crash course in ancient philosophy and global religion, it lays out a case for a multi-religious consensus to save the world. Part of this entails incorporating virtue ethics into science. Creation of tools may be neutral, but the use of tools is a matter of ethics. Science needs some external review of its choices, such as the field of bioethics.

Science can tell you how, but only ethics can tell you why.

Over the course of six weeks, I gained a deeper understanding and respect for the role of religion in shaping society. I was drawn to the ideas of using world religions to assist in being the moral compass for the future of humanity. The course highlighted practical applications of philosophy and religion to assist governments and science in solving the urgent problems driving global crises. Previously focusing more on the negatives of religion, I became more understanding of the benefits.

It turned out I agree with the heart of what the course asserts as religious consensus:

The common good serves all of us to unfold our human dignity through developing virtues. Virtues cultivate our health, intellect, emotions, aesthetics, and morals.  However it’s reciprocal: as you unfold your human dignity, you are obliged to build up the common good.

This happens through:

1. Solidarity—not just those in close proximity, and it must include care for our earth

2. Subsidiarity—every person and social organization have agency and are responsible for the above. “Don’t do at higher levels action that could be done at more basic levels.”

Reflections on Ethics in Action Course

At the beginning and end of the course, we were asked the same three questions. Below are my reflections at the end of the course.

What do you think it means to be a good person? Why?

A good person seeks to develop and live by a moral code. One’s actions should take into account the impact not just on oneself, but on other individuals, one’s community, and citizens of the world at large. Living by the “platinum rule”, or treating others as they wish to be treated is a higher calling than the traditional “golden rule”. Living an examined life and being thoughtful of one’s actions improves one’s own happiness, the well-being of others, and inspires others to live this way seeing the example of the behavior. We should seek to do no harm to others, but also to give generously of ourselves to improve the situation of others. We must strive for the long-term flourishing for all vs. the short-term hedonism for self.

What do you think is the role of religion in society? Why?

Historically, religion seeks to cultivate and refine that which cannot or has not been defined by science or reason. Religions seek to elevate humans above the pragmatic. Religions give us a cultural conscience for human dignity, the common good, and interconnectedness. The deep and ancient history of religious traditions means the religions are deeply imbedded in cultures. Since the majority of people in the world identify with a faith, religion when used for good can be a powerhouse for change. As described in this course, religions have the assets of virtues, moral heritages, and infrastructure to be powerful agents of moral, committed action.

What do you think “sustainable development” means? Why?

Sustainable development requires living in a way that allows for flourishing of all people living today and in future generations. The SDGs provide a plan to meet objectives across the three major categories--economic, social, and environmental.

My answers to these questions have not changed drastically. I now have a wider vocabulary, more practical knowledge, and hope of how these things may be achieved. I am embarrassed to say that prior to taking this course, I did not know about the SDGs. I will use the knowledge gained in this course to share the conversation and educate more people in my social circles about what can be done.

Overall Assessment of SDG Academy Courses

I felt the Ethics in Action course was a valuable use of time during my sabbatical. I read excerpts of various religious and philosophical writings. I learned about global peace initiatives and politics, climate change, and macroeconomics. While the course didn’t prompt me to return to religion, or blind me to many of the societal problems caused by religion, I became less judgmental and more accepting of the benefits. The course opened my mind and gave me hope.

Later that year, as I started to think more seriously about my future career, I took another SDG Academy course: Work and Employment for a Sustainable Future. This course explains the link between work and sustainable development and the role of work in human rights. I learned about historical shifts in work, current challenges, and potential models for the future of work. Topics included child labor, gender equality, formal vs. informal labor, models of welfare states, and increased automation of work. Again, I gained immense value from the course and left feeling more educated and hopeful.

SDG Academy courses are good starting points for those curious about global problems and collective solutions. Their limitations are in the medium: MOOCs are notorious for lack of engagement and low completion rates. A completely free, self-paced course requires discipline. The learner must choose how much to put into and thus get out of the course. Also, the depth of these topics calls for more interactive discussions and debate. This is not possible in MOOC format.

For a low-barrier introduction to important topics, I give SDG Academy courses five stars.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

We all watch the same sun set, although from different viewpoints