Ideals and Obstacles

Kindness. Mercy. Encouragement. Generosity of spirit. These are all moral ideals that I've written on recently. But there's an interesting thing about ideals. We never embody them perfectly. They may be perfect. But we're not. We fall short.

The value of ideals in our lives is in how we use them. They should be inspirational and aspirational - they should remind us, encourage us in the right direction, and often correct us.

The proper response to an ideal is to remember it and seek to live it. But we all encounter obstacles to the perfect embodiment of any ideal. We have our own psychological quirks and wounds, and some are buried deep beneath our conscious awareness. We have drives, and ticks, and sensitivities, and felt needs that can make it difficult to satisfy the strict guidance of our highest values. Something you went through in your childhood, or much more recently, could make it difficult for you, in some situations, to act in accordance with the golden rule, or your own best aspirations, in your treatment of another person, in action, gesture, or tone. 

Does that make you a hypocrite, for not always living what you might espouse? No, it just shows that you're a normal, fallible human.

Some people get all tied up in self-recriminations and guilt because of this problem. And those things then can become further obstacles.

How then should we respond to our own failures?

The first and most fundamental applications of kindness, mercy, encouragement, and generosity of spirit are always to yourself. Be kind to yourself. Be corrective and yet merciful toward your own failings. Encourage yourself along the path laid out by your ideals. And be generous to yourself as you seek and struggle and stumble along the road of improvement. Accord your own spirit the high value that you want and need to accord to others. That will create the conditions within you by which you can, increasingly, be these things to others, in even the most difficult of circumstances.

Love yourself properly, and you can then love others properly.

That's the real ideal.

How We Treat Others

How we treat others is really, in the end, how we treat ourselves. Our outer conduct always has inner results.

In a great little passage from Shakespeare's play, Hamlet, the Prince addresses his colleague Polonius about some theatrical players who are visiting, and we get this exchange.

Hamlet: Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time; after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.

Polonius: My lord, I will use them according to their desert.

Hamlet: God's bodkin, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty. Take them in.

Notice the evolution of the reasoning Hamlet uses with his friend. At first, he asks Polonius to "use" or treat the players well, and appeals to his self-interest in a fairly superficial way, pointing out that these are people whose job is, in part, to broadcast news and gossip far and wide, and that they'll certainly tell tales of Polonius, depending on how he treats them. If he treats them well, he will be well spoken of everywhere they go, and if the opposite, then his reputation will surely suffer. But Polonius objects, on what look at first to be moral grounds. He won't treat them well just because he'd benefit from that - he'll hold to higher ground and treat them the way they deserve to be treated. Duty, from this point of view, is always related to desert.

Hamlet feigns shock at that declaration, and jokingly points out that, on this principle, any of us would be lucky to escape a public whipping. He then suggests that the better course is not to treat others in accordance with their character or merits, but rather in accordance with our own honor and dignity.

The high path of moral action is to act well toward others because of who we are, not just in response to who they are.

Our actions should express our higher nature, and there are four distinct benefits from that.

First, by acting out of honor and dignity and treating others well, we set a high moral tone of kind action, rather than just responding to others in kind. We are moral leaders, rather than just reactive puppets who allow our own conduct to be dictated by others.

Second, by acting well, we reinforce our own ideals and higher tendencies. Whenever we act, we never just do, we always become. Third, kindness, generosity, and mercy do, in fact, more often than not, generate the good report of others, and this reputation indeed will serve us well in the hearts and minds of other good people.

And, fourth, we should be reminded of the words once spoken by Goethe, when he said:

Treat others as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they're capable of being.

By treating others well, we make gains, however small, in surrounding ourselves with the sort of people who are good company and good partners in making great things happen.

When we do well, things tend to go well in many ways.

The Wonder of It All

I was taking a walk in the neighborhood this afternoon, and suddenly noticed the strip of grass next to my feet, glowing a nearly luminous green, almost fluorescent in the bright, late day sun. At the same moment, the thought occurred to me: "It's just so weird to be alive, and conscious, and walking like this on the earth." The sheer unexpected strangeness of existence washed over me. Then I had to dodge a Hyundai sharing that existence.

You shouldn't for a second think that, because I'm a philosopher, I have thoughts like this all the time. I don't. Most of the day I spend awash in the vital trivia of everyday life, like most people - catching up on the news, mulling over whatever is the most recent sports or entertainment scandal that's on everyone's minds, letting the dogs out and back in, feeding the cats, or throwing them a ball, which, like dogs, they love, as long as its made of crumpled up paper. I read. I write. I exercise. I ponder what would be good for lunch, then later shift my concerns to dinner.

One morning, my wife and I had both woken up, but neither of us knew the other was conscious until, maybe, I moved, and she said "Are you awake?"

"Yeah, for a while now."

"Me, too. I was just lying here thinking about the problem of evil."

"Oh," I said. "I was thinking about what would happen if you microwaved dog food. I mean, would they like it?"

I'm not on the cosmic wavelength all the time. But occasionally, the sheer wonder of the world taps me on the shoulder. And then I marvel for a few minutes. Before I go back to doing whatever it was that I was doing before.

And yet, today, the wonder lingered. And another wonder formed. I said to myself, "I wonder if we'd all treat each other better if we did more to keep in mind the amazing, incredible, wonderful strangeness of being here in this world, on a tiny planet, hurtling through space together. Could metaphysics assist our sometimes limping manners and morals?

Socrates said, in his time, that the least important things, we think about and talk about the most, and the most important things, we think about and talk about the least. We should turn that around.

Ponder the awesome, bizarre, beautiful gift of life for a bit today. Or, the next time the universe taps you on the shoulder, give it a few minutes to reawaken your soul.

And, if you have a second, tell me about your latest cosmic experience.