In the first few pages, Palmer puts his finger on an important point: that we teach ethics as if it were a set of external rules, not something to be internalized. We have employee handbooks, and we have the real behaviors that people engage in. Of the many words he could have chosen to describe this disconnect, he uses "compartmentalization". People sometimes put their actions in one compartment and their principles in another.
I've only begun the book, but this makes me wonder how to reach past that barrier, across compartments, to reach a student's soul. (We are students as long as we choose to be.) I remember September 11th, and stock market crashes, the deaths of loved ones, and venerable American institutions disappearing, and I think of the sickening thud I feel when something that felt permanent goes away. When the status quo changes, a window opens, and there is an opportunity to reach the soul. And, of course, when we choose to open that window ourselves, when we choose to be students.
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Casting about for a bookmark, I grabbed a very old one from Borders in Ann Arbor, Michigan. On the back I had written this quote:
Does tolerance necessarily require a relativism that goes to the depths of men's and women's souls, depriving them of their natural right to prefer and to learn about the beautiful?From "Love and Friendship", by Allan Bloom. Perhaps a quote from the controversial The Closing of the American Mind would have been more appropriate here.
Tolerate = prefer? Clearly not. I put up with my loquacious neighbor's blathering but I'd prefer he left me alone. Bloom knew this. I wonder what point he was making. Certainly not encouraging intolerance as the right to one's own personal choices. Or was he?
ReplyDeleteHe had noticed that at the same time his students found tolerance (an admirable quality) they also seemed to lose the ability to figure out what they, as individuals, preferred. His question here asks if those events were related.
ReplyDeleteHe was trying to teach them to find what they considered beautiful, but I suspect that they often replied with "it's all good". And it is all good, but for each person there is a "great", and it's not the same as for the next person. Nobody needs to make excuses for being attracted to a particular type.
Over the last 20 years or so, there seems to have developed a perception that nothing done in the name of tolerance can ever cause a bad result. Maybe it's just that bad results from really, really good intentions don't count. In any case, we now have at least one generation of adults who seem handicapped in some areas of critical thinking, perhaps most notably the ability to practice vital self-criticism. It's hard to achieve any kind of self-understanding without a critical eye turned inward once in a while.
ReplyDeleteHi Jeff:
ReplyDeleteI'd like to suggest that our "souls" change over time. You start life with a group of principles passed along by a parent, a teacher, a religious leader and then life throws you a curveball.
You encounter the first situation in your life when you are forced to make a decision between your principles or an action that has to be decided quickly or the opportunity is lost.
So you weigh the pros and cons and you either stick by your principles or make an allowance to fit the circumstances.
The soul can either agonize at that disconnect or find a happy place to rest between the compartments.
After the first experience in which you reevaluate your principles, you mind and heart become a more open book. You are able to make better judgments based on making those hard decisions in the past.
Remember that old thing that one's parents used to say: "Don't do as I do, do as I say." A testimony to the difficulty in adhering blindly to principles.
Chris, what I see--and the limits of my vision are admittedly pretty short--is not so much people who can't critique themselves as people who lack direction. There are definitely some narcissists around, but the more common species is the person who gets themselves into trouble by not asking "what would I like my life to look like in five years". Or having only a superficial answer.
ReplyDeleteDonna, what you're talking about sounds like compromise, like a steady dilution of principles. I like to think of it in terms of learning and adding as we go along. The trick is to be aware of it in the first place.
Palmer's book seems to be, like the Bloom quote, about identifying what you really feel strongly about and living accordingly. I don't think a person really even needs to be able to verbalize it to make it work.
Hi again:
ReplyDeleteI guess it does sound like I am advocating a dilution of prnciples but it's not what I meant to convey. Principles are oten passed down through the ages, but that doesn't mean that one size fits all. As we mature, we encounter situations that teach us whether our inherited principles fit within our own filters of what is right and wrong. Rigid adherence to absolutes cause misery in the soul when they don't square within our personal code of morality. I'm going to be curious to see if God thinks I got this right.