Ethics: Sculpting Our Best Selves

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, Virginia), February 25, 2007, by the Rev. Don Robert Johnson, a former Methodist minister, a former college chaplain, and Leader Emeritus of the Ethical Society of St. Louis. Rev Johnson will be in the pulpit twice a month during Rev. Brownlie’s sabbatical.

Readings

With great difficulty, advancing by millimeters each year, I carve a road out of the rock. For millenniums my teeth have wasted and my nails have broken to get there, to get to the other side, to the light and the open air. And now that my hands bleed and my teeth tremble, unsure, in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust, I pause and contemplate my work: I have spent the second part of my life breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing the doors, removing the obstacles I placed between the light and myself in the first part of my life.

Octavio Paz, from The Poet’s Work

Whatever you may fail at, you need not fail at being a real person; the makings of great personal life include handicaps, deficiencies, troubles, and even moral failures; they too are raw materials out of which strong personalities are made… and personality, far from being a chance inadvertence, is the fullest and completest way of being alive…

Harry Emerson Fosdick, from On Being a Real Person

Only when a person has linked all parts in well-tempered harmony and has made the self one person instead of many, will that person be ready to go about whatever they have to do.

Plato, The Republic

By giving priority not to one contemporary moral ill or another, but to the neglected problem of the development of moral character we gain the prospect of the realization of moral ends.

The late David L. Norton, Ethical Culture Leader
and Professor of Philosophy, Univ. of Delaware

…tell our daughters they are

fragile as a bird
strong as a rose
deep as a word

and let them make
their own growing time
big with tenderness.

Besmilr Brigham

Sermon

For many years I have been intrigued by the stone sculpture work of Inuit artists. Rene Dubos once related the underlying dynamic process and reverence Inuit artists have toward the stones and the craft they create. With a deep sense of appreciation toward the natural stone, and with a profound sense of depth, the artist will talk to the stone. They believe inside each stone there already exists the being or essence which they are about to draw out by their sculpting. In this conversation with the object, they seek, in awe and a sense of comradeship, to tenderly help the stone sculpture to become it’s true self.

My premise is that this is the true purpose and underlying role of ethics — the individual’s creation of their true and fullest personhood. While this is certainly not the assumed purpose of ethics in today’s world, it does have roots in the classical tradition of ethics in the ancient Greek world, and to a certain extent, in many ancient religious traditions as well.

Such a full view of ethics extends our horizons from centering our attention on specific acts and difficult problems, to extending and enriching our lives. The individual wants to know what to make of life, what to become, whether one is moving in the direction of some ideal, genuine and full self. So much more than a quandary approach to ethics, this understanding of ethics is a lifelong process, and includes an understanding and appreciation of the tendencies, attitudes, traits, dispositions and traditions we bring to the ethical quest.

I do not prefer the quandary process of ethics, an ethical dilemmas approach to ethics popular today. Ethical living is not simply the deployment of appropriate theories in difficult situations. This approach fails to answer the question: But who is this person? Who are they becoming?

In reality, whenever you have a practical dilemma, you bring to it a particular personality with a unique character formation that adds specific ingredients into the situation faced. We become the human beings we are in the context of relationships, events and experiences we have had. These shape our likely response to moral conundrums.

A modern novelist describing one of his characters says, "He was not so much a human being as a civil war." … such inner discord commonly takes the form of tension between what we are and what we want to be. Every human being sometimes faces a situation where on the one side is the actual self with ... abilities and circumstances, and on the other are ideal pictures of the self, … and between the two is such disparity that they have no practicable relationship. When what we are and what we dearly want to be thus face each other in seemingly hopeless disproportion, inward civil war begins.

The reality of life is such that we all become discouraged with the actual that we are. Yet no person is capable of being whole until they are able to discover and accept the real self. This does not mean resignation to the actual momentary self that results in negative, passive, apathetic attitudes toward the self, but rather the acceptance of self — a positive, active, involved being who is growing and changing, with potential.

The great theologian Paul Tillich went so far as to say that the moral imperative: the highest obligation is the demand to become actually what one is essentially. The tragedy of our modern era is that the voice of one's essential person is silenced, step by step, by depersonalization, enslavement, the competitive style of life, fear, conformity and a host of other factors.

This moral imperative

is not an external will imposed upon us, an arbitrary law laid down by a heavenly tyrant, who is strange to our essential nature and therefore whom we resist justifiably from the point of view of our nature, but is precisely our essential being with all its potentialities, our created nature, which we truly are. It is not a strange law that demands our obedience, but the ‘silent voice’ of our own nature.

Counter to the church and the state pushing "obedience" as the crowning virtue, fulfilling our essential potential is the moral imperative.

Therefore, a moral act is not an act in obedience to an external law, human or divine. It is the inner law of our true being, of our essential or created nature... . An antimoral act is not the transgression of one or several precisely circumscribed commands, but an act that contradicts the self-realization of the person as a person and drives toward disintegration. It disrupts the centeredness of the person by giving predominance to partial trends, passions, desires, fears, and anxieties. Morals guide the conscience in concrete situations, but none of them, taken as law, has absolute validity. The Ten Commandments express not only our essential nature but also the wisdom and the limitations of an early feudal culture. Certainly there is risk in deviating from the wisdom embodied in a concrete tradition. But there is also risk in accepting a tradition without questioning it! If done with self-scrutiny, often in the pain of a split conscience, and with the courage to decide even when the risk of error is involved, this road offers growth.

That is why Tillich named the books on this subject The Courage To Be and Morality And Beyond.

Behind any basis for accepting oneself is the concept of grace--the acceptance of the unacceptableness of all persons and of all in us that is unacceptable, and attributing to all persons, including ourselves, worth as a person. And central to the task is a willingness to get off the wagon of conformity, which so drives us if we are not careful:

Henri Fabre, the 19^th Century French entomologist, conducted one of his famous experiments with pine processionaries ... Fabre's caterpillars were Thaumatopoea processionea, "the wonder maker that parades."

... . Fabre found them so sheeplike that he wondered what they would do if he could somehow manage to make them leaderless. In a brilliant experiment, he arranged them on the upper rim of a large vase a yard and a half in circumference, and waited until the head end of the procession joined the tail end, so that the entire group was without a leader. All were followers. For seven days, the caterpillars paraded around the rim of the vase in a circle. Their pace slowed after a while, for they were weary and had not been able to feed, but they continued to circle, each cater-pillar unquestioningly taking his direction from the rear of the one in front, until they dropped from exhaustion... .

While ethics is talked about alot today, much of modern ethical theory and emphasis is minimalist in what it considers as moral issues. It is technical, lacks depth, views dilemmas as occurring in a vacuum, and often ignores background, personality, training, foresight, and tradition. It does not claim a large enough territory for its domain. To take the resolution of problems as the central task of ethics is to ignore character formation in moral deliberation.

When difficult choices face us, what personality and character formations we bring to it determines much about whether we will even know it is an ethical dilemma and how we will respond. Only high ideals, impressive examples and personal development are capable of enlisting the full measure of human aspiration. They can guide moral development and transform random change into directed change that brings moral growth.

So the primary focus of ethics is with the qualities of character and identity: who we should be and how we should live. Classical morality begins with the question: What is a good life for a human being? This leads directly to the development of character, because any description of a good human life will necessarily include attributes that are not always manifest in persons in the beginning of their lives, but are developmental outcomes. (That is why there is little good to three-week crash courses on business ethics in a graduate MBA program!).

And this sense of ethics has even a prior basis: To be a human is in the deepest sense to be a problem to oneself, specifically an identity problem. The task is deciding who one is at their essence and deciding and endeavoring to become that self. In classical eudamonian ethics nothing in human experience is without moral meaning and the moral situation (or dilemma) is the life of each person in its entirety. The fullest concept here is integrity: the true work of each person is his or her life, to which vocation and all other dimensions should be contributory. Integrity represents the integration of all dimensions of the self, such that each complements all others, and all contribute to the end of the worthy life that is one's own to live. There is no non-moral domain of refuge from what should be our ultimate concern: the good life for human beings, individually and corporately. We have an obligation to answer for our own worth.

Moral progress consists in enlarging the area within which we can endeavor to make a good life for ourselves. For individuals, moral progress means recognizing richer possibilities, growing in their appreciation of them, and increasing their freedom. For traditions, it means creating a context where individuals are encouraged rather than hindered in their aspirations to make a good life for themselves. Our traditions, our culture needs to function toward the individual person as the Inuit artist does toward the stone sculpture. drawing out what in essence already exists inside.

One other point: Ethics at its best is not punitive or corrective. It is not the common notion that morality is about a life harassed and persecuted everywhere by rules and disagreeable duties. Rather, it is about worth and goodness, pleasure, satisfaction, and a full life. Rather than placing morality over against self-interest, it is the fullest culmination of the self .The end product of this attempt to be and live ethical should be human-flourishing, not self-denial.

Whatever other tasks we may be given, none ought to have a higher priority than to be real persons. To fail at that is to fail altogether: to succeed at that is to succeed supremely.

The first responsibility for each of us is to become a real person — to be who we essentially are — and in being so, accept ourselves and be thankful.

When we seek to sculpt ourselves into a clear identity and to fulfill our deepest potential, we are indeed working both with clay and with materials as difficult to mold as stone. What lies beneath the service is hidden and our success will depend upon both our patience and our tolerance with our selves. The task was stated well by Gustave Thibon

If you fly away from yourself, your prison will run with you...
If you go deep down into yourself, your prison will disappear...

UUC Home Page