Kindness. In a surprising cultural time of snark, derision, and callous cruelty among people, it becomes a powerful and healthy counter-cultural act to be kind. If you use social media for any time and watch the news nightly, you'd almost think kindness was a foreign language, or perhaps the hardest thing in the world. And it's the very opposite. It's built into our nature as one of the requirements for proper spiritual growth and inner fulfillment. When we show kindness to others, we certainly benefit them, as well as the general tenor of society, but the deeper reality is that we cultivate our own garden in a beautiful way. So I often ask myself: Why wouldn't everyone want to do this? Nasty benefits no one. Kindness is good for all.
The Sea-Wolf, written by Jack London, has become one of my favorite novels of all time. It’s about the power of goodness when held onto and lived despite terrible obstacles, and also it's ultimately about the power of moral partnership to prevail over what seems to be invincible evil. It’s a message perfect for our time. I first read this in 2014 but too quickly. On my second read, just finished, I came to appreciate its depth as well as its compelling narrative.
Wolf Larsen is a thoroughly amoral leader, the captain of a seal hunting ship, whose only personal value is power and its exercise. He’ll kill a man just to feel that power. In our own time with too many amoral people in leadership positions, Wolf stands apart. He has the body and physical strength of an Achilles and a brilliant mind, though rough and unfinished through being entirely self-educated, even at the earliest stages of reading and writing. He was born of a poor family in a remote region of Norway and lived a rough adventure that led him to the leadership role in a seagoing ship. He has attracted a crew who are mostly as hardened and casually evil as he can seem to be. We learn of him through a highly educated literary man who survives the capsizing of another boat near San Francisco and is “rescued” by the Ghost, Larsen’s ship. The Lord of the Flies has nothing on what subsequently transpires, with our narrator, Humphrey Van Weyden, forced into service on the ship and treated with abominable cruelty.
This castaway is puzzled by the seasoned crew members on board, who seem able to endure agonizing physical injuries without complaint, but will “fly into the most outrageous passion over a trifle” (40, Book of the Month Club Edition). Van Weyden says of a particular seal hunter aboard:
<<He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and cursing like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with another hunter as to whether a seal pup knew instinctively to swim. (41)>>
He goes on to comment about the rest of the men:
<<Childish and immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their reasoning was still more childish and immaterial. In truth, there was very little reasoning or none at all. Their method was one of assertion, assumption, and denunciation. They proved that a seal pup could swim or not swim at birth by stating the proposition very bellicosely and then following it up with an attack on the opposing man’s judgment, common sense, nationality, or past history. Rebuttal was precisely similar. I have related this to show the mental caliber of the men with whom I was thrown in contact. (41)>>
And the moral caliber of most of them was much, much worse, with a few exceptions, soon to be roughed up and killed. Later, our narrator says of the ongoing discussion, modeling the political discourse of our own day:
<<The hunters were still arguing and roaring like some semi-human amphibious breed. The air was filled with oaths and indecent expressions. I could see their faces, flushed and angry, the brutality distorted and emphasized by the sickly yellow of the sea-lamps which rocked back and forth with the ship. (43)>>
One of the mates tells the new arrival about the captain, making what he takes to be a useful distinction: “He’s not black-hearted like some men. Tis no heart he has at all.”
Of the amoral and power-hungry skipper and his top henchmen, reflecting again too much that's wrong about our own world now, our narrator says:
<<The callousness of these men, to whom industrial organization gave control of the lives of other men, was appalling. I, who had lived out of the whirl of the world, had never dreamed that its work was carried on in such a fashion. Life had always seemed a peculiarly sacred thing, but here it counted for nothing, was a cipher in the arithmetic of commerce. (64)>>
Later in the story, after Humphrey witnesses the may terrible and unpredictably evil actions of the captain, who keeps our narrator alive only because his education amuses the brute, and this autodidact skipper among fools finally enjoys having someone to talk to about literature and philosophy, an event of great significance happens. The ship spots and picks up some other marooned sailors and a passenger from another ocean going vessel who are bobbing about in the vast pacific clinging to a small boat and hoping for rescue. An elegant and exquisitely educated young woman, Maud Brewster, a famous poet who is by wild coincidence known to our narrator—a literary critic who loves her work—is among them. Humphrey desperately tries to tell her about the captain:
“You must understand, Miss Brewster, and understand clearly, that this man is a monster. He is without conscience. Nothing is sacred to him. Nothing is too terrible for him to do. It was due to him that I was detained aboard in the first place. It is due to his whim that I am still alive. I can do nothing, can do nothing, because I am a slave to this monster, as you are now a slave to him; because I desire to live, as you will desire to live; because I cannot fight and overcome him, just as you will not be able to fight and overcome him.” (208)
The ship was a sort of hell presided over by Wolf Larsen. Maud eventually calls him Lucifer. Humphrey comments on the man and his henchmen:
<<Wolf Larsen it was, always Wolf Larsen, enslaver and tormentor of men, a male Circe and these his swine, suffering brutes that groveled before him and revolted only in drunkenness and secrecy. (243)>>
But the tale is not told with too much gruesome detail. It’s not like what I would imagine one experiences reading a horror novel. There’s psychological complexity and a wonderful narrative flow. Wolf and Humphrey even debate their opposing worldviews marvelously, when alone, the crass materialist and the spiritually sensitive man of morals debating life and death and value. The conversations are fascinating. Larsen enjoys the rare intellectual challenges, but on a whim might thrown his interlocutor across the room or choke him nearly to death, just to display his power.
Humphrey and Maud know they have to escape the ship where their deaths are eventually inevitable. And there the story takes off and becomes one of the most amazing tales of all time. The two of them face the greatest odds imaginable and adversities that would be impossible to imagine in advance, much like Odysseus in The Odyssey, but brought into a more modern and less mythological day.
There are lessons about persistence and resilience and courage and confidence and success again the odds all through the book, but especially in its final third. I wish I could take the time here to share more of the lessons on goodness and partnership in the face of evil and overwhelming adversity, because they’re reassurances we all need right now. But instead of going on and on, I’ll simply commend the book to you in the strongest possible terms. If you buy it on amazon, take care the publisher. There are independent publishers now who mangle the text and make it microscopic, and Amazon has unhelpfully put the same comments on each edition, though the complaints clearly apply only to one or two. I’ll paste here a reliable publisher, and you can just click the pic. At some point, please read this book! And yeah, in advance, you’re welcome!
For the book, click HERE.
"Oh, God, why do the wicked prosper?" This was the repeated worry and lament of the psalmist, who can sometimes come across as a real complainer, falling into a common form of philosophical confusion.
We all know, or know about, people of whom it's said that "He gets away with everything!" At least until he doesn't, like Bernie Madoff. We can even be tempted to say of such a person that he's crazy lucky or strangely blessed to get away with everything he does. Plato and Epictetus, by contrast, say that he's cursed, because "getting away with stuff" makes him a worse and worse individual, corrupting his soul even more with every "success."
The classic philosophers would often say: Bad is the man who wants to do evil, worse is he who gets it done. In what can appear to be a run of unethical achievement, there is no true success but only corruption, the degradation within that Socrates warned us about.
As the poet Terence once said, "Wealth is a blessing to those who know how to use it, a curse to those who don't." The same is true of any worldly accomplishment. Those who seem to get away with wrong, if we look closely, also seem to grow more and more desperate as time passes. They don't feel inner contentment, or fulfillment, or genuine happiness, in even a small measure. I've seen this up close. They can't maintain true friendships, or deep relationships of any kind. They aren't free at all but are rather enslaved to false, blighted, and immensely unhealthy motives. Their very progress down the road of their urges takes them farther and farther from their true good. They are to be pitied and not resented or, last of all, grudgingly admired. They become shells of who they could have been, and almost ugly, contrastive caricatures of human excellence. They are never flourishing, but at best can only maintain the outward counterfeit of that. So, God let the psalmist complain, and then calmed him down and turned him around with a little more of the wisdom he needed and that we all could benefit from, as well.
For more on what’s wise and otherwise, visit me any time at www.TomVMorris.com!
Today while walking the dogs, I was thinking about parallels between business and sport. No, not the aspect that first might leap to mind, about winners and losers. And you know, I don’t think either business or sport is primarily about those two categories in the first place.
Imagine that an industry or even a profession is like a sport. Healthcare, tech, banking, investments, law, medicine, academics, manufacturing, are in a sense analogous to big overall team sports like football, baseball, basketball, and soccer. Individual companies, firms, or practices in those industries or professions are akin to teams, and they have within them more teams. An industry, or profession, like a sport, provides us human beings with a framework where we can develop our talents, grow, and make a difference in the world.
Hang with me for a minute. Let’s think of business and sport as frameworks, or matrices, within which human talent can be developed, molded, and unleashed to pursue excellence, and perhaps greatness. As such, they are spiritual endeavors. Leaders are needed in all such frameworks. So are strategies and tactics and education or training. And I think talent then has to be developed in three ways:
1. Through the development of skill.
2. Through the development of character.
3. Through the development of intellect.
Excellence depends on all three. The skill component is the most obvious. Football players need to learn to tackle, and block, and handle a ball. Basketball players need to develop skills of moving, defending, passing, rebounding, and shooting. But character is just as important. Excellence in any competitive sport or industry requires courage, grit, tenacity, determination, persistence and honesty. At its highest and broadest levels, it requires empathy, kindness, and fairness to others. And then there is the mind. Great performers hone their minds, cultivate their intellectual understanding, and then know how to use the deeper realms of the mind, such as the unconscious, or the imagination, to go where no one has gone before and do what no one has done before.
Ethics in business, a profession, or a sport, is about being true to those three forms of development, while being true to yourself and others. Nothing less is ever genuinely great. So ethics is never just icing on the cake. It’s a crucial aspect of the entire baking endeavor, and the cake itself. Of course, the Greek word from which ethics derives, ethos, meant character. The character of a team, business, or professional endeavor depends on the development of individual skill, character, and intellect on the part of all the players involved. Their proper personal growth makes possible great teamwork, which then makes possible further growth, in what philosophers call a virtuous circle of flourishing. This is the power of ethics in everything.
Ok. So. One day years ago I had lunch with Norman Lear at his vacation home in Vermont, formerly owned by Robert Frost, and then the famous abstract artist Kenneth Noland (look him up if you don't know his work). It's a beautiful place adjacent to a state forest. The photo here is Norman standing at one of the doors. We ate outside on the porch. Sunny. Perfect temperature of about 70 degrees, with a light breeze. I think we had sandwiches and various picnic salads fixed by his chef and staff. I could hardly focus on what I was eating. Because, hey, it was Norman Lear. Sitting two feet away from me. Maybe three. Creator of All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Sons, Good Times, Maude, and on and on, while also funding and producing movies like This is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride, and Fried Green Tomatoes. And in his spare time founding People for the American Way, among other organizations. I later had lunch with him at a Las Vegas hotel dining room, and later still at the Biltmore Hotel in Montecito, California. The food was always good, I think, but it's the talk I remember. And one day, walking through the kitchen in his Brentwood Hills LA home, The kitchen staff was cooking up something really great, but I had to be somewhere else. You know philosophy. Always something. Busy, busy.
But back to the vacation house. We had a nice little lunch party. Norman and me, along with the then Dean of the Harvard Divinity School and his wife, and Tom and Kate Chappell, married founders of Tom's of Maine, the eco friendly personal care products company. The six of us laughed a lot. I was pretty funny. Norman wasn't bad, either. I remember that Fed Ex pulled up with a package about every fifteen minutes, and he got a phone message about every five minutes, all of which he waved off until somebody important was "calling from the plane" and he had to absent himself for a few minutes. Hollywood.
After lunch, Norman invited me to take a walk with him, just the two of us, to talk. We ended up lying in the grass in his huge front yard and pondering life and creativity and the spirit. He said, "It took me a long time to realize the importance of ethics and spirituality in life, and that if you don't get these two things right, you'll not likely get anything else right." That was pretty profound, and deeply true. He also asked me if being creative ever made me romantically frisky. But he used other words. I said, "Hmm. I never thought about it, but I guess so. How about you, Norman?" He said, "All the time, Tom. All the time."
Ethics. Spirituality. Creativity. And other stuff.
I've got many more stories from that and other lunches, but I should sign off now. I'm feeling creative.
I have a good story and an ethical conundrum for you today.
My father built some of the early radio stations throughout the southeast US in the late forties and early fifties of the last century. He wasn't ever the money guy, just the expert hired help who knew how to set up a radio station, find the right person to put in the electronics, get a guy to build the tower, and then call on all the local businesses to sell ad time on the new station before it went on air.
In the course of working in small towns in North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, he met some real characters along the way. One guy he told me about when I was growing up was a man who always dressed very nicely and carried in his wallet only one thing: a one thousand dollar bill. He took my dad out to eat several times in small restaurants and diners and it was only on the second or third occasion that he told my father his special trick.
He never had to pay for a meal. Ever. He had done this for at least a year. He'd go into a local joint, looking like a million dollars in his sharp suit, order a meal, and at the end, when the check came, he'd get out his wallet and open it up, and then exclaim: "Well, my goodness. Would you look at that? All I have is a thousand dollar bill? Can you change it?"
The waitress would be shocked. She'd ogle the bill, and exclaim, "Goodness Gracious!" or some such Southernism, and call the cook, or owner over to see. They'd then continue to exclaim.
The man would be so apologetic. "I usually try to carry something smaller than this! I'm so sorry!" The locals would be simply stunned.
"Is that real?"
"Yes, ma'am, as real as it gets!"
"I've never in my life seen such a thing!" Everyone would examine this rare specimen of US currency. It would be like seeing the Hope Diamond in person. And then whoever was in charge would inevitably say, "Well, it's just a treat and quite an honor to see a greenback like that. I bet you only come across those in New York City or Hollywood!"
"And hardly ever there!" our character would knowingly remark.
"Well, look. Dinner's on the house! We just appreciate you coming in today. I wish my wife was here to see this. It's my treat."
"You don't have to do that."
"Heck. I can't change that anyway. And I'm just pleased to have a fellow like you come into the joint and grab a bite. It's been a great pleasure to meet you and talk to you. Let it be on the house."
"Well, if you insist. That's quite gracious of you. And, next time, I'll try to have a more ordinary collection of bills in my wallet." They'd then shake hands, all around. And the character would leave, with one of the restaurant's mints in his mouth, or a toothpick in his teeth.
Now, the question: Was this guy's action ethical? Was he ethical? Or was what he was doing wrong? Please explain your answer.
I'll have the graded copies back to you next week. Class dismissed.
We have no clear idea what's next. I mean, after this life. Really.
We speak of heaven, and "the next adventure" but we have for this inevitable end that each of us will meet the most extreme dearth of detail regarding any important thing imaginable. That's why life after death books sell so well, and it's why psychics and clairvoyants stay in business.
One thing seems likely to me, having studied this for decades. It will matter then what we do now. We should treat each other in this life as well as we possibly can. For theists, it's an obligation. For atheists and agnostics, it's a bold dramatic gesture. For all, it's an exercise of radical freedom, achieved with difficulty - not to react slavishly and reciprocally to what others do to us, but to set new standards for what those others need to have done for them. Each of us is called to be a pioneer of elevating action. Each of us is called to heroic grace.
We should treat others exceedingly well, despite what they sometimes do to us, not just because of what they are created to be, but because of what we ourselves are created to be. The fact is that we deserve the effects of such actions as those we ought to perform. Many great thinkers, such as Plato and Shakespeare's Hamlet, have understood this. We all need to, as well.
The relationship between the now and the hereafter is simple. The now is limited. We know that. And it will affect whatever hereafter there is - even from an atheistic perspective, for what is now created and done will never cease to have been, forever into the future. Every act is eternal. The full story of reality is vastly and everlastingly different, depending on what we do now, day-to-day. There's always the possibility of demeaning behavior or elevating action - it's left to be our choice. What then will we do?
Integrity. It's one of those words we all think we understand, and yet, when asked what it means, we might find ourselves stumbling out partial answers. It's about character and being ethical. It's about doing the right thing, or aligning yourself with the side of good. It involves telling the truth, and keeping promises, and being dependable. Right?
Well. These are all implications of integrity. But what, actually, is it?
The word comes from the same etymological root as integer, meaning a whole number. And there's a big clue. Integrity is somehow about wholeness. It's about not compartmentalizing your decisions and actions, walling off some from the rest of who you are. It's about acting with the wholeness or entirety of your beliefs and values, in every choice.
But wait. A thoroughly bad guy, an immensely corrupt character, a murderous terrorist could act in every choice with and from the wholeness or entirety of his insane beliefs and perverse values, but we wouldn't call him an individual with integrity, would we? No. Of course not. Because integrity isn't just about consistency. It's a moral concept. And there's our second clue.
A rascal, criminal, or deranged psycho can be consistent in his actions, throughout the range of his conduct. That is to say, his actions can be consistent with each other, and with the false beliefs and skewed values he holds. But to have integrity, you have to display wholeness in another sense. You need the wholeness of health. Integrity is about moral health. And that's about more than just mere consistency among your actions. Your choices and action have to also be consistent with objective standards of health that are independent of your own thoughts and feelings - that are, in a metaphysical sense "out there" in the world.
What are those standards? I suggested years ago in the book If Aristotle Ran General Motors that they're Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity, understood properly. If your life, thought, and actions are all consistent, or at one, with Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity, then you are a person of integrity. You have integrity. Or better, it has you. Because there's an important sense in which you don't really possess it until it owns you. You can be good in fits and starts - a mostly good character, a decent soul, overall, even a kind person most of the time, but if there is not a higher calling that you've said yes to, in a deep and abiding way, perhaps because you really don't see any reasonable alternative, then you aren't yet a person of integrity.
That's a high standard. But that's because it's what integrity is all about. Most people admire it from afar. Some actually live with it. Many are apparently blind to it, and just don't get what the big deal is about it. But I'm convinced that it's tied in deeply with not only what I call "true success," but also true happiness, contentment and fulfillment. It's also a part of what it takes to make your best possible mark on the world.
Are you living with it? many of us try to embody it in at least most aspects of our lives, at least most of the time. But it calls us to live it wholeheartedly, fully, and consistently across everything we do. It's a high calling, and a hard calling, but it's the one true path to the best life we can live. As such, it's well worth working hard to attain.
Check out Albert Einstein musing on the faith of his birth and how he expands out from it:
Judaism appears to me to be almost exclusively concerned with the moral attitude in and toward life. […] The essence of the Jewish concept of life seems to me to be the affirmation of life for all creatures. […} There remains, however, something more in the Jewish tradition, so gloriously revealed in certain of the psalms; namely a kind of drunken joy and surprise at the beauty and incomprehensible sublimity of this world, of which man can attain but a faint intimation. It is the feeling from which genuine research draws its intellectual strength, but which also seems to manifest itself in the song of birds…
That one clause made me smile: "a kind of drunken joy and surprise at the beauty and incomprehensible sublimity of this world, of which man can attain but a faint intimation."
Here's what's both humbling and exciting to ponder: We can sometimes have a huge, intense, soul enlarging experience of that beauty and incomprehensible sublimity, a mystical realization coming to us unheralded, and stopping us in our tracks. I recently wrote on one such experience I had during a daily walk, some weeks ago (click here). And sometimes, like Saul, on the road to Damascus, it's a life changing experience that reorients everything for us, opening us up anew and turning us onto a path we hadn't really seen before.
Just like the Psalmist, we can feel that "drunken joy and surprise at the beauty and incomprehensible sublimity of the world." And yet, however great and overwhelming the experience might be, Albert E considers it merely "a faint intimation" of the true reality that encompasses us. Just think about that, and its implications.
Wouldn't it be great to carry with us every day that sense that we're living and working amid immensities whose grandeur and scope are so great that our highest mystical experiences capture only a glancing glimpse of the hem of its garment? Then, perhaps, we'd really have a new moral attitude, and an affirmation of all life that would make us lights in the darkness that so sadly seems to engulf many in our time.
Truth is a wildly blazing sun. Carry with you at least a small candle in its honor. Cast light in the darkness wherever you go.
