Measuring Goodness

"I think we can't go around...measuring our goodness by what we don't do.By what we deny ourselves...what we resist and who we exclude.I think we've got to measure goodness...by what we embrace,what we create...and who we include." — from the Easter Sermon, Chocolat

There are two great systems of ethics that most of us live by, often without realizing where they came from or their full outlines. While we may not know exactly why we make our decisions that does not prevent us from making them. But neither can we justify or even explain why we chose them in the first place. 

One system is built around duty, what we ought  to do. According to Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential philosophers of the modern age, we should act out of free will without regard for reward or punishment. What matters is why we do something, and the principle that establishes some action as ethical or not is whether we willed to do it or not. In Kant’s view, the only actions that could be counted as ethical would be the ones that we did because they were the right things to do, not because we wanted to do them or they gave us a warm feeling for having done them. We may, in time, come to enjoy doing what’s right, but that shouldn’t factor in as the reason to do the right thing. 

The other great system emphasizes the consequences of our actions. In the words of John Stuart Mill, the 19th century British philosopher who brought utilitarianism into general use, utility holds that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” By a calculus of goodness, then, we are called to maximize pleasure and minimize pain for the greatest number of people. In short, we try to do the best for as many people as possible. 

These are general theories of ethical action, not a cookbook for whipping up a delightful dish of goodness for the situation at hand. Yet we unconsciously use these throughout our days to handle most of our ethical dilemmas. At times we do what we must, no matter what it might cost us; at other times we try to make the best of the situation for ourselves and those around us. Neither system answers all our questions. Most of us use both of them without feeling that we have to choose one over the other. 

Yet, we usually have a default position, an ethical perspective that we act from almost intuitively. We may, upon reflection, choose another way, but we can learn a lot about ourselves by how we instinctively react to matters that confront us. 

So in the spirit of summing up at the end of the year, here are some ways you can tell which ethical system you most naturally follow. 

You know you’re a Duty person if:

• It makes you grumpy when people pass you when you’re driving the speed limit;
• You finish your chores before you go out to play;
• You toss and turn at night, replaying a faux pas you committed that day; 
• You make sure your car is parked straight within the lines;
• You’d rather embarrass yourself than cause someone else embarrassment by pointing out their mistakes;
• It pains you to leave something undone;
• You find yourself muttering, “What if everyone did that?” several times a day; 
• You pick up trash that other people drop;
• You can think of many reasons why someone did what they did;
• You’re more fascinated with why someone did something than what they actually did; 
• Holidays make you uncomfortable;
• A good day is when you get through your list;
• A bad day is when you don’t even make a list;
• Your besetting sin is self-righteousness;
• Your most annoying trait is being a tight-ass;
• One of your good traits is that you’re reliable;
• One of your best traits is introspection;
• You are an investor.

On the other hand, you know you’re a Utility person if:

• It matters to you if everyone around you is happy;
• You keep working for consensus after everyone else has taken their toys and gone home;
• You’re all about efficiency: effectiveness is for the slow;
• You’re an idea person, not a detail person;
• You get impatient with people who keep asking questions;
• You’ll hire an expert if it will save time;
• You like to be seen as generous;
• You’re comfortable with groups of people; 
• You’d rather have three okay desserts than one fantastic one;
• You think in economic metaphors like ‘the bottom line’ and ‘cost-benefit ratios’;
• Your besetting sin is cutting corners to get what you want;
• Your most annoying trait is blaming others;
• One of your good traits is that you can make decisions quickly;
• One of your best traits is that you’re willing to try new things if it will bring better results;
• You are an entrepreneur. 

For the duty-bound among us, here’s a gentle word for the new year: Don’t let doing things the right way stop you from enjoying the trip. 

And to those who are all about the bottom line: It does matter how you get there because you have to live with what you picked up on the way. 

It’s not too late to begin again.

Wearing the Faces We Keep

“Those who strive to account for a man’s deeds are never more bewildered than when they try to knit them into one whole and to show them under one light, since they commonly contradict each other in so odd a fashion that it seems impossible that they should all come out of the same shop.” — Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

Montaigne, that affable, erudite, bemused observer of human nature—mostly his own—would have found no end of contradictions in our political process. In an essay entitled “On the Inconstancy of Our Actions,” he marvels at the many faces we wear, sometimes on a single day, and wonders why people try to make sense of someone’s actions, especially “seeing that vacillation seems to me to be the most common and blatant defect of our nature.” 

Off he goes in his inimitable fashion, piling on Latin quotes from ancient philosophers and playwrights, and whipping out quips like a ninja’s throwing stars. “It is difficult to pick out more than a dozen men in the whole of Antiquity who groomed their lives to follow an assured and definite course,” he says, “though that is the principle aim of wisdom.” What’s more likely, says Montaigne, is that we “follow the inclinations of our appetite, left and right, up and down, as the winds of occasion bear us along.” 

So we get Herman Cain, a supremely confident man, who wakes up one morning and thinks, “I could be president: let’s do it!” Or Rick Perry, striding like a colossus through the Republic of Texas, glib in his own surroundings, but tongue-tied on the national stage. Who can resist the spectacle of the genteel but thoroughly manufactured fury of Mr. Romney, prodded out of his postage-stamp size comfort zone by the uncivil zaniness of Newt Gingrich, himself newly-resurrected and kissed by the media polls? Gingrich, who leads with his tongue, but has already sold his brain to science, defiantly admitted one of his major personal failings, a capacity to change to fit the context. For a conservative these days that is moral turpitude second only to being ‘progressive.’ Romney wins that honor, having declared himself a moderate Republican a few years ago. How he must regret those careless words about reforming urban schools and providing aid for the elderly! 

A politician these days must display an unbending spine of steel, be deaf to all pleas for fairness, and follow conscience, especially if it leads to money. In these chaotic times, when a reputation can vaporize with a single tweet, politicians decide their positions early and hold to them though the heavens fall. God forbid that they should see an issue in a new light, for that might demand a willingness to compromise. Thus obstinacy and bone-headedness are taken as the virtues of courage and resoluteness. As the Republican primary debates trudge onward it’s clear that only the strongest will survive this Bataan death march of moral recalcitrance. 

Why do we do this? I say ‘we’ because it is we the people who demand leaders who can instantly assess a volatile situation and then ignore their best counsel in order to stay the course. As American troops withdraw from Iraq I wonder if anyone can still believe the reasons why we devastated that country? Why do we want people who cannot deliberate, who will not reconsider, who can only perseverate? Montaigne was not glorifying inconstancy but neither was he denying it. He was allowing for it. That’s not the same as promoting it; it’s the realization of limits and how to work well within them. We want our leaders to be recognizable as leaders from a distance so we create a template for identification purposes. Do this, say that, wave this, kiss that. They have to fit the pattern or they won’t be taken seriously. Lacking any criteria for discernment, humility, and courage—characteristics essential for leadership in any age—we’re left to judge these people by the decibel level of their rhetoric and the cut of their hair. 

At the heart of it is something that is both necessary and elusive—trustworthiness. That is all we really require from a leader. The rest of it can be learned on the job, provided that person has the courage and strength to do so. 

When we communicate with each other, said Aristotle, we look for three things: logos, pathos, and ethos. They can be understood as reasoning, the ability to understand and empathize, and character. These were the things that Aristotle thought would protect us against the professional liars and the demagogues. How quaint they seem now in this viciously trivial political culture. 

“Virtue wants to be pursued for her own sake,” said Montaigne. “If we borrow her mask for some other purpose then she quickly rips it off our faces.”

History and the Scarecrow

“Some things are too clear to be understood. . . . We always have to go back and start from the beginning and make over all the definitions for ourselves again.” — Thomas Merton, Seeds

There is a common view that under the skin we are all alike, that were it not for accidents of birth, language, geography, and culture, we’d probably all be . . . Americans, or at least Western Europeans. On the other hand, Americans are so imbued with the belief that each and every one of us is sui generis, and that we have something of enormous import to bring to the universe which would not arrive in any other way, that we would be shocked to find ourselves considered merely curious in most parts of the world. 

We are constantly trying to make sense of life. It appears to us in many forms: as a ‘darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night (Arnold),’ or as hope springing eternal or as the marketplace in which fortunes are made and lost in a moment, but no one is sure why or who to blame. And we see the many variations on a theme, some of them irreducibly contradictory, and may come to wonder if we could, any or all of us, ever understand each other. 

So at the end of a semester of teaching a course in Jesus and the Gospels, one that coincidentally I began my teaching career with 30 years ago, I discovered that the Jesus of the Gospels is even less intelligible to me now than he was then. Then I was fresh out of graduate school, brimming with other people’s research and ideas, ready to pass it all along to eager, inquisitive students. The Jesus of history and the Christ of faith were parallel figures to me, but they appeared to converge at only a few points. While Jesus of Nazareth could be placed in the historical stream of events with some certainty I never felt that I understood him. If the Christ of faith, carried in the heart, was more real I had the uncomfortable feeling that it was because he was made in our image—a 20th-century man under the first-century garb. Jesus was a first-century Jew whose short life was spent traversing the countryside of Galilee with occasional trips to Jerusalem. The Christ was an urban dweller, equally at home in Corinth as in Carthage, and fluent in Christian faith-talk. 

Those classes back in the day were exciting as we tried to look with fresh eyes at the Jesus of the Gospels. Reading the Gospels as both scripture and as literature, like miners we worked our way down through the layers of history with some of the tools of modern critical research on the Bible. But while it was illuminating to make the Gospels our primary texts instead of the usual Bible commentaries, it was usually with the assurance that the end of the story was known. The trajectory of the plotline was so familiar that we did not bother to look where it landed. I came away from the years of teaching that class with a sense that I had barely scratched the surface. I knew more of the context, of the historical and critical tools that helped to identify the strata of the texts, but I could sense that there was so much more to be found. 

Then my personal and professional life changed directions and for the next twenty-plus years my teaching was in communication theory, public relations, ethics, and religions of the world. Jesus and I traveled the same routes—not always at the same times however—and I found myself regarding him from a greater distance than before. I tried to place him more clearly within a historical context, a process that sharpened his outlines but made him smaller, like looking through the wrong end of the telescope. But my admiration for him increased, along with the growing conviction that I wouldn’t have understood him more than the disciples, even if I’d spent as much time with him as they did. I wasn’t even sure I could recognize him if he wasn’t surrounded by a crowd. 

Coming back to the course after all these years has been an exhilarating—and humbling—experience. The students have changed drastically—not just that there are new ones to take the place of the former students—but in so many other ways. When I first taught the course in 1981 almost all of the 100 students in two different sections were white and from Seventh-day Adventist backgrounds. This semester there were two white students in a class of 30 and only one was raised an Adventist. Most of the class were Africans and few of them were teenagers. They had come from many different Christian or Muslim communities; some had left families and husbands back in other countries, and they were here to become nurses as quickly as possible. They were dignified, deferential, and quietly stressed with work, studies, children, and bills. They regarded the Synoptic theory with wonder and found the variances between the Gospels as troubling at first and finally, merely interesting. For many of them Jesus was not a mystery but a personal friend. 

But I felt myself gripped this time around by the otherness of Jesus, the numinous quality of that which is alien, even transcendent, while still intensely human. I found myself struggling to put this experience into words. Whereas years ago, still in the heady glow of graduate school, I wanted to set off firecrackers in the classroom and rip away the placid veils of ignorance, now I came as one who knows how little he knows and is grateful to experience that hunger. 

We cannot step outside of history, particularly when it comes to following Jesus. His history is ours by virtue of the fact that he made our history his own. And yet . . . we must not grow too complacent with this God-man who can bless children and throw out money-changers. He traveled easily with prostitutes and counted possible insurgents as his friends. His eyes could fill with tears over the pain of the many, but he could roundly curse the religious authorities to their self-made hells. He knew us through and through and loved us anyway. In the end, he went to his death without heroics. Like a scarecrow against the threatening skies he was an awful sight to see. Most of us ran. Against all odds he transcended death after descending into it like one diving into the wreck. And on the third day, rising, he opened a portal to a parallel dimension. Lest there be any misunderstanding he said he would be with us to the end. Now we see through a glass darkly but one day face to face. 

Black Friday Blues

“In most societies, the very practices of routinized aggression in games, spectacles, and rituals of sacrifice that allow for expressions of anger and hostility also serve to shield people against full confrontation with the role of violence in their midst.” — Sissela Bok, Mayhem

Waiting through the usual previews, recently, before the Feature Presentation, we were treated to an updated version of Warner Bros. Tweety Bird and Sylvester. All rich colors and CGI enhancements, the characters remain the same, locked in an eternal Manichean struggle as predictable as it is violent. The cat was smashed flat, hurled through windows, rolled by a bus, impressed upon a brick wall, jabbed, flipped, bounced, punched, slammed, and wadded up — all to the warbling whine of the bird-as-victim, Tweety. At the end of this spectacle my wife leaned over and whispered, “Is it any wonder why my parents didn’t let me see this stuff?” 

Generations of children through decades of American television cartoons have seen this stuff, however, and new generations continue to thrill to the adventures of cat and bird. Coming on the heels of several stories of Black Friday violence, shoppers running amok, it made me wonder how to put all this into context. The temptation to Make a Pronouncement, Draw an Inference, or otherwise Reason to a Conclusion, reared its head, hoping for a blessing. Reluctantly, I gave in, cautioning myself to keep the salt nearby for a quick intake.

Two recent incidents, similar in the weapon used, bring our casual violence front and center. The first, in which a cop used pepper-spray on a huddled line of students at UC Davis protesting on behalf of Occupy Wall Street, immediately drew the outrage of millions when video of it appeared online. “But they were protesting peacefully,” ran the argument, which suggests that the cops would have been justified in spraying them had they been violent. An unprovoked attack is plainly wrong, especially when the right of peaceful assembly is upheld by Constitution and history. But an unprovoked attack by cops on citizens these days in front of literally hundreds of cameras, any of which can upload almost instantly to the Cyberus in the sky, is folly beyond belief. With the whole world watching, you had to ask yourself, ‘What was that cop thinking?’ It might be that he just snapped, finally having his moment in which all his inchoate rage boiled to the surface. 

But let’s say he’s more disciplined than that. Putting oneself in his position, a couple of reactions come to mind. On the one hand, he did it because they deserved it. After all—damn kids—why aren’t they in class? Snotty kids. Someone’s got to teach them to obey! If he took that position maybe he thought he had the Law on his side, along with all the grownups and adults. But on the other hand, maybe he didn’t think anything about it, that is, he didn’t think what he was doing was harmful or unusual. It was a brush-back, a gesture, a push, a show of force, just to establish who’s in charge here. Nothing personal, just business. If it’s the first option, then he obviously missed the lecture on freedom of speech back in high school. But if it’s the second he’s not going to understand what all the fuss is about. We live in a violent society; casual violence in pursuit of good ends is justified. Restoring the peace is justified: what’s the big deal? 

The second incident that brings our casual violence into sharp relief is the ‘competitive shopping rage’ of a woman at a Wal-Mart in the San Fernando Valley who was making the most of her Black Friday offensive maneuvers. Minutes after the kickoff at 10 pm she had fought her way up the aisle to the Wii display where she took her stand, defending her booty against all attackers by hosing them down with pepper spray. Bystanders in other aisles caught the toxic cloud and were soon choking and tearing up. Not to be deterred, the woman marched off to another part of the store and did it again. The story I read did not say whether she stopped to pay for the items. Nobody apparently took her down nor were police able to get a make on her, presumably because she couldn’t be clearly seen through a veil of tears. 

You have to wonder if she reacted violently because she felt threatened or if she’d planned it all along. The fact that she did it twice might suggest that it wasn’t simply blind rage. I guess we should be glad she didn’t have a gun. How would you like to be the kid who receives these presents on Christmas Day, knowing that his mother literally fought for his right to get what his heart desired? 

There’s no direct line from Tweety Bird and Sylvester to a rogue cop and a customer run amok. These are isolated incidents, brought to light by a media that feeds on them and holds them up as the norm, if only through stultifying repetition and commentary. So I’ll come to a modest and tentative conclusion: Perhaps all this is simply entertainment, examples of life imitating art for an audience easily distracted and looking for the next over-the-top moment. Perhaps we are in the position of the child described by David Denby in his thoughtful Great Books, who “knows that everything in the media is transient, disposable,”  everything is a role that can be changed or tossed, depending on the ratings and our attention span. But perhaps now is the time to put away childish things. 

Shall We Let the Dogs of War Sleep?

Who will tell me

why I was born,

why this monstrosity

called life.— Anna Swir, from Poetry Reading

One of the unintended consequences of globalization is that no one is a bystander to world events anymore. A. C. Grayling, Master of the New College of the Humanities in London, philosopher, and frequent contributor to The Times, notes that “Saying that there are no bystanders any more means that everyone is involved in everything.” In Grayling’s words, running away from our knowledge of atrocities and terrorism “is a refusal to recognise, think through, and try to deal with the sources of that danger.” 

There have been plenty of opportunities to think through the atrocities of the twentieth century, the bloodiest in modern history, and one of them, the Khmer Rouge genocide against the middle class in Cambodia, surfaced this week in a story in the New York Times. A tribunal that is trying leaders of the Khmer Rouge has released one of the defendants, Ieng Thirith, 79, the most powerful woman in that government. Between 1975 and 1979 the Khmer Rouge government murdered 1.7 million people through “execution, torture, forced labor, starvation and disease.” Ms. Thirith, the former minister for social affairs, was charged with crimes against humanity in “planning, direction, coordination and ordering of widespread purges.” 

But the tribunal has recommended the immediate release of Thirith because she “lacks capacity to understand proceedings against her or to meaningfully participate in her own defense.” She exhibits symptoms of Alzheimer’s, is disoriented and forgetful, and sometimes talks to herself. Occasionally, she snaps in public and rants at the tribunal, proclaiming her innocence and expressing shock that she, the scion of a respectable family, should be hauled up on such outrageous charges as murder and genocide. Apparently, her powers of reasoning allow her to place the blame for murder on her compatriots, while she was only responsible for bureaucratic paper-shuffling. 

Her fellow defendants are, like herself, old people now, but once they were young revolutionaries who joined Pol Pot in turning Cambodia into the killing fields. Pot Pot died in 1998 without coming to trial. Should the international community forgive these people because it was a long time ago and the defendants are weak, powerless people with one foot in the grave? 

It is a mark of moral courage that courts such as the International Criminal Court even exist. The United States is one of three countries worldwide that unsigned itself from the Court during the Bush era, will not participate in any proceedings, and will not allow its citizens to be brought up on charges. No doubt there are varied and complex reasons for this, but it smells bad. 

Since we are all participants and no longer bystanders, the action of the U.N. court in Cambodia raises all sorts of ethical questions. A humane society holds that no matter the culpability of a defendant, that person cannot be tried if he or she cannot understand the charges through mental incompetence. The presumption is that only the sane can be tried because only the sane are responsible for their crimes and for the acknowledgement of them. The banality of evil in people (the phrase is Hannah Arendt’s) means that a person can sign the death warrants of millions and go home to a loving family, a cosy dinner, and a satisfying sleep for a job well done. Thus, Ieng Thirith, no doubt as sane as any government official can be, could participate in genocide but cannot be held accountable for it years later because she has the mental and moral capacity of a squirrel. 

Many of the 20th-century’s war criminals have been indicted while in their golden years but die before a verdict can be reached. Slobodan Milosevic and Augusto Pinochet come to mind, while the early phase of Mubarak’s trial in Egypt was conducted while he was in a hospital bed. No doubt Syria’s Assad, should he ever come to trial for crimes against humanity, will suffer a heart attack. I’m sure it’s all very stressful. On the other hand, rough justice of a sort caught up with Saddam, and Gaddafi, already indicted for war crimes before he met his ignoble end in the midst of an angry mob, might have also stood trial. 

Is it the sheer magnitude of their crimes, that sometimes beggar description, which fill us with revulsion? Is that why they should be brought to justice? What do we gain by sentencing a 70-year old to 134 years in prison? Even if they are executed that doesn’t serve as a deterrent to up and coming young dictators; each one seems to believe that he plays out his drama on a stage sequestered from the world. Can we make up for the loss of thousands of lives, sometimes millions, of victims who will never live out their potential? Can one death redress the hurt of so many of the victims families? 

We know it can’t. But we’re also not willing to let these crimes pass by. Why do we pursue the perpetrators, spending years and sometimes millions of dollars tracking them down, producing witnesses, compiling evidence, and presenting the facts? 

Perhaps it is for two reasons: to honor the memory of those who were humiliated, displaced, tortured and executed, and to remember what it means to be human. Vengeance is God’s but honor remains to us, the living. We must carry on from day to day, fighting the impulse to strike back in like manner, and instead, through a scrupulously fair legal process, show that the poison of evil that pervades the human psyche does not define the human spirit. 

Rick Perry and the Politics of Certainty

How it tilts while you are thinking,

and then you know. How it makes no difference

for a long time—then it does. — William Stafford, “Figuring Out How It Is”

This week Rick Perry cocked a finger at Ron Paul in another Republican debate and shot a blank. In a gaffe heard round the world, Perry couldn't come up with the third in a short list of federal agencies he'd throttle if he became president. In a single, riveting moment all his Texas-sized bravado farted out like an untied balloon. It was awful and cringeworthy and . . . there's a lesson in it for all of us.


The world is made up of two kinds of people: those who think they know and those who know they don’t. I am definitely in the second camp. . . I think. How can we even make definitive statements like the one above when we are “of two minds”? How can we know anything with certainty? 

I am fascinated by people who speak with absolute certainty, and slightly repelled also. I wonder how they can be so sure, why they think they have an inside track on knowledge, and most of all, do they ever admit to being wrong? Confucius said, “Do you know what true knowledge is? To know when you know a thing, and to know when you do not know a thing. That is true knowledge.”  Epictetus, that tough old Stoic, used to say, “You can’t teach a man something he thinks he already knows.” And therein lies the beginning of wisdom, without a doubt. . . 

It’s not easy being this way. For one thing, living in a state of doubt means constantly seeking evidence, testing, sifting, weighing what appears, until something emerges from this process that offers a glimmer of hope. There are facts, of course, and necessary truths, such as 2 + 2 = 4, and all those a priori truths that Kant lured out of the shadows. For the doubter, even these pose at least a momentary pause (Whaddya mean these are axiomatic? Prove it!) until the mind overrules the emotions in the interest of saving time. 

Down at the level of leather-on-the-pavement this kind of epistemological suspicion can become quite inconvenient. For awhile after the United States Postal Service misdirected a couple of bills and my electricity was cut off I could not bring myself to drop any letters through a post box slot. Instead, I delivered the check in person, not trusting a service that daily delivers, with uncanny precision, tons of junk mail to each and every citizen with an address. I got over it. Eventually.  

For years I have wished that I could hold a viewpoint with confidence if not with complete assurance, for it would make life so much easier. Inevitably, I admit that an opposing perspective has its points, that in all honesty some of its points are better than mine, and after all, who am I to say that I stand upon the solid rock, while all around is shifting sand? Seeing multiple points of view often leads to double vision—and to vertigo—that existential disease that leaves one panting, hanging over the abyss while mice gnaw at the sleeve caught on a branch that soon will snap. Dubious workarounds present themselves in such desperate circumstances. One begins a sentence without knowing how it will end but the mind churns on, dredging up in nanoseconds all manner of rusty facts and anecdotes, the tires of memory lying at the bottom of our subconscious, the flotsam and jetsam of headlines and conversation. Occasionally, the will to power asserts itself, all niceties are sheared away, and the mind fastens, terrier-like, upon a position, any position that looks like it could stand an absent-minded glance if not a steely scrutiny. In those moments, one feels a giddiness that can be mistaken for  certainty until someone breaks the silence that follows with a sigh and a shake of the head. 

Time and time again I’ve had the experience of suddenly seeing something familiar shift ever so slightly and take on a new form. In those moments I wonder at the filters I’ve apparently installed that prevent me from seeing the full spectrum of visible light. Once having seen the new thing it cannot be ignored, of course, and one is left to ponder how much else has been overlooked or ignored because it simply did not register on our consciousness. But selective perception is not the only constraint upon us. In a discussion I used to be the one who waited so long with a question or a comment that the general train of thought had hurtled over the horizon by the time I offered it up. I wanted to make sure that my question did not betray any lack of knowledge or foresight.   Once I realized that recognizing our ignorance is the first movement toward learning, much of the ego simply melted away. 

So I bow to the idea that we are social animals and that we learn together. I’m rarely capable of doing a Descartes—shutting myself up in a little room and doubting my way down through the detritus to the solid foundation of indubitable existence. I learn faster when I’m with a group of people who have maximum curiosity and the willingness to share it. Most of what we know is handed to us, warm to the touch, from people like ourselves or sometimes from people we think we’d like to be. In those cases, having our doubts can be a good thing because they give us a moment to step back and look at the wide shot first. 

Humility and grace—the two virtues that free us up to learn. Of that I am certain.

Connecting the Dots

Distance does not make you falter,

now, arriving in magic, flying,

and finally, insane for the light,

you are the butterfly and you are gone. — from Goethe, The Holy Longing

On the evenings I step back inside my home from an hour at my local coffee-house, I often pause by a bookcase just inside the door. I pick a book at random, usually one I’ve not read for awhile or even never read—having bought books over the years that I grow into eventually—and opening it anywhere, take in the tone and cadence, the rhythm of the sentences, the delight of walking in on a conversation in full swing. Reading out of context breaks the mind out of dull expectation; it throws one almost violently into a world emerging into light, a creative disjunction, an optical bending of shapes into images. All that, and it’s fun, too. 

I picked up Michael Meade’s Men and the Water of Life, an initiation into myth and storytelling, and found a poem by Goethe I’d not read before called “The Holy Longing,” which concludes with this:

And so long as you haven’t experienced

this: to die and so to grow,

you are only a troubled guest

on the dark earth.

 Then I pulled down Colin Wilson’s brilliant work, The Outsider, written when he was only 24, in 1956. The Outsider traces the literary development of the alienated ones, the  people just beyond the thinnest edge of the crowd, the ones who by their very nature do not fit nor conform to polite society. They cherish their aloneness, yet they need others to truly be themselves. And the first page I opened it to . . . contained the stanza above from Goethe’s poem. 

These moments of serendipity are mysterious and welcome. For me, they happen often enough that I am not surprised, though I’m always grateful. They are one of the small wonders of the universe. It’s like coming upon a bonsai garden, the tiny, perfectly-formed trees. sometimes hundreds of years old, that stand majestically in their created environments. 

On my way up the hill to home, with the sound of endless traffic behind me and a moonless sky above, I was thinking of “home.” Not the domicile (from Latin, domus) where, as the thesaurus puts it, “whenever you are absent, you intend to return,” but this Earth, this world. Perhaps not just this third rock from the Sun, but more the world we both create and observe, the imaginative world within which we live and move and study ourselves. 

My students and I had been talking in philosophy class about freedom, freewill and determinism, the questions that ask whether we choose our actions, whether we are destined or fated, or if we are simply flung upon this earth. The question I had put to them reflected our readings and our discussion: 

The determinist says: Every event has its explanatory cause.

Some people say: Everything happens for a reason.

Is there a difference between these two positions?

The answers were thoughtful, wry, insightful, even humorous. One group stepped up vigorously and denied any differences. Cause and reason, they said, are different words for the same thing. We see an event: we trace it back to a cause. If everything happens for a reason then there must be a cause, since reason implies purpose, and purposes don’t come out of nowhere. 

Another group advanced more cautiously, working the knife in between the stones in the wall and in finding the differences. For them, ‘cause’ implied a point of origin, the initial shove that set something in motion. ‘Everything happens for a reason’ is the phrase that people use in the aftermath of an event when they’re trying to make sense of something. They say it over the shoulder as they doggedly trudge forward. 

A smaller group saw it as the bridge between science and religion, since science seeks knowledge of events and religion looks to faith to interpret what cannot be solely based on facts. 

And all week I had been, in spare moments, reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs, both rich in detail and broad in its scope. It’s a fascinating work, not only because Jobs is a fascinating subject, but because Isaacson sees the relentless purity at the center of the man’s soul. Jobs was a man whose dark side got up every morning and went to work with a knife between his teeth. His light side appeared occasionally, smiling and charming, with the knife held loosely behind his back. He was the dazzling embodiment of Kierkegaard’s maxim, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” And for him the one thing was found at the intersection of Art and Technology where extraordinary engineering met exquisite design. He could not bear any deviance from the path of simplicity that led to perfection. How deep were his flaws and how high his aspirations!

Such purity of heart is dangerous, a flame that consumes all and finally itself. Is this what it takes to make a dent in the universe? 

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent.

Because the massman will mock it right away.

I praise what is truly alive,

what longs to be burned to death.

Every event has a cause but not all events are visible. Everything happens for a reason but sometimes we only see it after it’s over. Looking back, we connect the dots.

Gaddafi, Interrupted

“When the passions of the past blend with the prejudices of the present, human reality is reduced to a picture in black and white.” — Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft

In the moments before starting a class I was about to teach in bioethics, one of those moments in which some students stare into space while others read over the assignment, a large woman burst into the classroom with a shout, her face wreathed in smiles, arms over her head, body swaying in a herky-jerky dance: “Gaddafi is dead!”, she sang out. “Gaddafi is dead!” Some in the classroom registered mild surprise, others merely nodded, one or two gasped; the majority simply smiled at the delight of this woman who continued to chatter amiably about the event. 

The next morning I glimpsed the front page of the New York Times and saw a blurred photograph of Gaddafi, head bloodied, a rictus of terror on his face, surrounded by men with guns, under a blazing sun that cast everything into patterns of light and dark. The photo was taken from a video shot in the moment—no doubt with a cell phone—a video that the Times assured us was even now circling the globe. A hated dictator comes to his end, dragged out from a drainage ditch, spreadeagled across the hood of a car amidst a mob, and eventually shot in the head at point-blank range. That’s one version of the story, anyway. 

The moment of liberation has finally come, a moment which Gaddafi, for all his paranoid bluster and atavistic arrogance, must have imagined in his night-sweats while on the run. ‘Lo, how the mighty have fallen,’ came to mind, as did memories of Sadam Hussein, wild-eyed and disheveled, dragged like a maggot from his hole on his way to a quick finish at the end of a rope. These moments are preserved for us, first in pixels, then in memory. But as Susan Sontag reminds us in her On Photography, “The ethical content of photographs is fragile.” In time, these photos will fade, not just physically, but from our immediate consciousness also. “A photograph of 1900 that was affecting then because of its subject would, today, be more likely to move us because it is a photograph taken in 1900.”

How do we distinguish the moments in which the hinge of history slides ponderously open? That which the media chooses today as the key to the future becomes in that future a footnote to a larger event from the past. With time and patience the historian discovers a pattern among the bones. But I am fascinated by the need in us to create a meaning now, to build a house upon the sand for the purpose of selling the real estate before the tide turns and it is swept away. Thus, every spike in the EKG of world affairs draws out the pundits whose wisdom-for-hire keeps us amused and distracted. 

This is not to say that we shouldn’t put current events in a context nor should we refrain from trying to understand what’s going on. I think it’s something else entirely, this uneasiness I have about a beta version of historical meaning. I came across a quote recently which looks at this puzzle from the other end.

“It often happens that those who live at a later time are unable to grasp the point at which the great undertakings or actions of this world had their origin. And I, constantly seeking the reason for this phenomenon, could find no other answer than this, namely that all things (including those that at last come to triumph mightily) are at their beginnings so small and faint in outline that one cannot easily convince oneself that from them will grow matters of great moment (Matteo Ricci).”

We feel the need to know what will happen, so much so that we will create a probable history so that our commitments of time and money and political capital will find the greatest return on investment. We’re not very good at predicting the future. Who foresaw the Arab spring? We’re much more sure about our ‘winter of discontent,’ as gas prices surge and ebb, as health care in this country leaves millions in the cold, and as the political campaigning runs its brutal, if predictable, course. 

Journalists of the old school, used to finding the facts and delivering them with as little authorial inflection as possible, are now asked to render judgment on what they report. This is a waste of time and talent, but not of money. In this branding era a news staff comes to be known for its daring—not the courage of reporters entering a war zone or taking on the rich and powerful—but of those who turn headlines into questions that have no answer. “Which Dictator is Going Down Next?” “Is Cain Dead in the Water?” “Can Rick Perry Overcome His Debate Blunders?” and “Will the Murdoch Clan Survive?”

Marc Bloch, an eminent French historian, joined the Resistance against the Nazi occupation of France when he was nearly 60. He was later captured by the Nazis, tortured, and finally executed near Lyons with twenty-six other patriots on June 16, 1944. In 1941, having been forced out of his academic post because of his Jewish ancestry, he began a book, The Historian’s Craft, which was never finished because of his untimely death. In it he reports on an incident, “the airplane of Nuremberg,” in which rumors of a provocation by the French against the Germans were not only untrue but went undisputed because it was useful to believe them. “Of all the types of deception,” he says, “not the least frequent is that which we impose upon ourselves, and the word ‘sincerity’ has so broad a meaning that it cannot be used without admitting a great many shadings.” 

I like what Steve Jobs said in his now-famous Stanford Commencement address of 2005: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.” Some think journalism is the first draft of history, but in a 24/7 news-cycle today’s news is tomorrow’s history—and that’s simply not enough time to connect the dots.

Transcending Opinions

“It is not enough to relate our experiences: we must weigh them and group them; we must also have digested them and distilled them so as to draw out the reasons and conclusions they comport.” — Michel Montaigne, The Art of Friendship

“This is only my opinion, but. . . .”  Lately, whenever I hear that in the classroom, in a conference, in a faculty meeting, or in casual conversation, I want to tear off all my clothes and start screaming. Since that is against most social norms and my better judgment, I signal my displeasure by the merest arching of an eyebrow. 


How did we come to this point in common discourse? Why is it that when we edge ever closer to subjects of significance and weight, points that ought to be argued, elements of life that divide and conquer people, we retreat with a disarming smile into a cloud of unknowing? 

The rules of engagement in these battles are followed to the letter. First, the disclaimer: “This is only my opinion. . . . “ Translation: I’m sorry if you take offense at anything I say, but everyone has the right to their own opinion.” This is followed by the actual opinion, which varies in its relevance to the discussion, but usually reflects the unconscious prejudices of the opinionator. Finally, there is the idemnification clause, intended to protect against the disagreeable opinions of others fired at point-blank range: “You may disagree, that’s okay—everyone is entitled to their own opinion—but I’m just saying. . . .” Then the speaker usually lapses into passivity, content to have said his piece, but uninterested in any extension of the argument unless it challenges his right to express his opinion. 

This signals the death of dialogue and the throttling of democracy, which relies on the free exchange of ideas. But how can ideas freely circulate when they come walled about with petulant assertions designed to shore up fragile egos? We have lost the art of “conversation,” a word which can be traced back to its Latin roots in the idea of living in company with others, literally, ‘to turn about with.’ Another ancient root, a scriptural meaning, relates conversation to a ‘manner of life,’ or a way of being, never merely as a means of communication. It signifies a willingness to trust one another, to extend to others the means of grace whereby genuine learning can take place. It assumes that conversation takes time, that it evolves, and that it is so much more than mere assertion. 

Robert Grudin places this squarely in the realm of liberty and calls these conversational skills the ‘arts of freedom.’ In a fascinating meditation entitled On Dialogue, Grudin says, “Once gained, moreover, the arts of freedom must be kept fresh by thought and action, taught to the young, bequeathed down generations.” Otherwise, he warns, the posturing demagogue and the ravenous mass-marketer “will turn liberty into its own caricature, a barbarous fool driven by fear and greed.” 

It might seem a long leap from a classroom discussion to the foundations of democracy. We must also be wary of blaming the end of civilization on the young and restless. But Grudin, a professor of English at the University of Oregon, believes that these arts can and should be taught. “The operative pedagogical philosophy is that skill in these arts will enable people to make decisions and follow courses of action beneficial to themselves and society. In other words, people can learn freedom. Freedom is useless without a rational and emotional instrumentation that gives it substance.”  

What I often see in classroom discussions is more a clash of egos than an exchange of ideas. Many times those who speak up are so eager to claim their point of view as theirs that the point—if there even was one—is lost. Teachers don’t help much either. When I worked in faculty development I saw many syllabi which laid out elaborate rules for classroom discussions. I was struck by the pervasive fear which ran through the assumptions behind these rules. Students had to be protected from the sharp edges of differences between them: once you entered the classroom there were no races, genders, or cultures. Reference to these social categories was taboo: each person was both an individual so autonomous that he perceived reality in exclusively personal terms and he was a member of a massive, amorphous, egalitarian lump. No doubt the intentions were that no student should feel discriminated against—something no one should have to suffer—but the effect was to limit discussion to the confident few who wielded their vorpal swords for sport. These parts of our identity help make us who we are and we ignore them at our peril. They come back as labels and epithets if we don’t take their influence into consideration.

We learn with each other, that’s what conversation means. We are social beings, which is to say we find out who we are through interaction with others as well as reflection by ourselves. Self-awareness and self-reflection, though, are learned behaviors, brought about through practice in hearing about ourselves from other people as we dialogue. When we don’t practice at listening before we speak we panic when spoken to. Our desire to be known for ourselves rises up and before we know it we are chanting the mantra of the blindingly obvious: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. . . .” Whereupon we deliver our opinion as a verdict rather than an invitation. 

I once went to a conference for men held at a large hall in downtown Washington, D.C. It was led by Robert Bly, a poet and self-styled men’s mentor, who had just published a book entitled Iron John. It was a manifesto on being a real man without becoming a slack-jawed, brutish jerk. During the course of his presentation he gave some time for statements and questions from the floor, but placed some conditions on the speakers.  They had to keep their contributions to three sentences in the interest of time and they could ask questions—but any sentence that was not a question had to be a simple, declarative sentence. It was issued as a challenge: say what’s on your heart without hedging it about with qualifiers. I took it as a request for open, sincere, and rugged conversation. Nobody could do it. Virtually everyone who spoke danced about their subjects, adding implied questions, footnotes, self-referential phrasing, and jargon. Bly was disgusted and berated us for our narcissism. 

I have often thought of that experience for it revealed some principles I’d like to live by. We need to think before we speak; we need to listen to others; we need to give each other grace so that we have a space in which to learn from each other. That’s not my opinion, that’s my invitation.