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“Towards a Personal Morality”

William Sasso

May 1, 2005

Imagine with me, for a moment, that you find yourself in the scenario that I will now describe.

  Suppose, just for a moment, that others had finally come to recognize the deep and amazing wisdom within you, and that you had found a home at the top of a mountain. A prophet, the leader of a great and powerful people, knowing you will be found there, scales the mountain and asks your guidance for those people. She asks you for a set of guidelines or rules for those people to live by, guidelines that will help those people, as individuals, live good lives.

What would you say to her? How would you instruct those people to live? What would you tell them to do, or not to do?

Take a moment and think about that, and then, if you care to, you’ll have an opportunity to share one or two of your guidelines for a good life. I’ll ring the bell to signal the beginning of the sharing . . . [Silence, and then Sharing]

Just in case you are curious, I’d like to share some of the ideas for guidelines that occurred to me, as I considered that scenario:  

1. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. (the golden rule)
2. Love the transcendent you understand to speak in your life with all your heart, and love your neighbor as you love yourself. (an adaptation of the “great commandment” in the Gospel of Luke).
3. Spend your life – your time, energy, and love – wisely and intentionally.
4. Live with a sense of what an amazing gift life is!
5. Be a person of integrity and honesty.
6. Be willing to change, without fearing to stand firm.
7. Strive to find a balance that renews and refreshes your life.
8. Be willing to sacrifice for the things that you believe in.
9. Respect the rights and particularities of others.
10.  Some form of John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” broadened from “country” to something larger that I can’t seem to find the word for. Perhaps “the community of life” or something along that line?
11.  Model in the actions of your life the characteristics and values you would most like to see present in other people.
12.  Honor those who have been responsible for your development into a more complete and more “whole” human being.

 As you can tell, this is not a final version. There may be some redundancies, and I still can’t figure out what to use in the JFK quote. And while I know that I could have come up with additional guidelines, twelve of them may already be more than enough! Cognitive psychology suggests that we can keep about seven things in mind at once . . . like seven principles, perhaps?

But let’s go a bit further with this. Suppose we change the scenario a bit. Suppose that you are still a wise and revered person located on a mountain top, but that the person who climbs the mountain, instead of being the leader of a great people, is a solitary individual who seeks your guidance about how she should live her own life. The question remains the same: “How can I live a good life?”

Is there any reason that you think your response might change? It doesn’t seem to me that it should. It would seem to me that the rules of individual behavior within a group ought generally to apply to an individual as an individual, although I’m willing to consider that there could be some rule that might not apply or somehow might not make sense within the individual context.

 Now let’s make one more change in the scenario. Suppose the individual who climbed the mountain seeking guidance was you someone you know very well – suppose it was you yourself. Would your response change? Again, it seems to me that it should remain the same.

 Frankly, even though some of us may have achieved significant wisdom, and may have developed a well-formulated understanding of how humans can better live together, I seriously doubt that any of us will ever find ourselves in scenario one, where the prophet climbs the mountain to ask our guidance on behalf of the people she leads. Some of us may encounter the second scenario, where an individual seeks our advice and guidance about creating and living a good life (though, when the question comes up, we will be more likely to be in an office or a kitchen than on top of a mountain). Most likely, the conversation will not start with a question quite as direct as “What should I do to live a good life?” But some of us have probably had those conversations, where another sought out the insight we might have on this question, out of some sense that we might know at least part of the answer, that we might at least “have a clue.”

While it’s unlikely that any of us will be asked to provide moral guidance for a nation or a people, and while it is possible that some of us may be approached by an individual who seeks our wisdom, I think we all encounter the third scenario in some form or another. For instance, we all come to points in our lives where we face some kind of moral choice – where the easy thing to do somehow doesn’t seem to be the right thing to do.

The histories of the women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights movements are filled with examples of people – individuals like Rosa Parks, for instance – who made difficult choices, fortified by a sense that they were doing what they believed to be the right thing.

And it is not just in the work of great social movements that a strong sense of morality can make a difference. In my own life, I regularly struggle to find the “proper” balance between the amount of time I spend with my family and the time I spend on my professional responsibilities here. I know that many of us face some version of that issue.

This is the sort of situation where some rules for living might help me figure out what I really ought to do. But in order to help, they would have to rules that expressed my fundamental values, rules that I really do “buy into.” If I look back at the set of guidelines that I came up with, several of them do seem to speak to this issue. For instance, one of the guidelines reminds me to “Spend my life – my time, energy, and love – wisely and intentionally” while another counsels that I should “Strive to find a balance that renews and refreshes my life.” Others, too, seem to speak to the situation: “Model in the actions of your life the characteristics and values you would most like to see present in other people” and “Honor those who have been responsible for your development into a more complete and more “whole” human being.”

These don’t tell me the answer, but they do help shape my thinking about the issue, and force me to consider the values I would like to make most central in my life.

 As many of you know, this month, May is the last month before I begin a period of sabbatical and  vacation. Since I’ll be gone for a while, and since I want to do my part to make sure that you’re not bored while I’m gone, I’m going to offer you some “homework” to work on while I’m gone. You can think of it as an “extra credit” project, if you want to. And when I’m back in the fall, I’ll convene some opportunities for anyone who would like to share their works and progress with the rest of us. So here’s the homework (and I will have a hard copy of this assignment available at the door today, so you don’t have to try to write it down).

 First, write out your own set of rules for living a good life. You can write as many as you need, but remember that sometimes “less is more.” You are welcome to use other sources. You might, for example, consider the Ten Commandments, or Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, or Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Fourteen Precepts,” or Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thoughts on the nature of a successful life, or other statements of moral principles. The list that I shared earlier began with the golden rule and a variant of the great commandment, as well as an adaptation “in process” of John F. Kennedy’s signature quotation, and an adaptation of the fourth commandment.

 Second, take a look at those rules from the “inside.” In other words, how do you feel about these rules as they are present in your own life today? Do they describe the life you live? Do they describe the life that you want to live? Do these questions suggest any changes in your rules? You can do this as a “thought experiment,” or – better yet – try them out in your life. You might, for instance, carry them around in your pocket or wallet or purse and refer to them after every meal for a week or so.

 Third, take a look at those rules from the “outside.” How would you feel about living in a house with someone who was following those rules as devotedly as possible? How would you feel about those rules when they described not your own behavior, but the behavior of others relative to you? Again, do these changes suggest any changes that you might wish to make?

 Fourth, find someone else – one other person – who is doing this “extra credit” project, and share your work with each other in the spirit of learning from each other, in a spirit of collaboration. The two of you need not come up with a shared set of rules, though it would be fine if you should care to try. The point is more to hear each other’s rules, and consider whether one of you has included something important that the other may have missed. You may have rules that might conflict, or at least suggest different priorities, and that’s all right. But after this discussion, again, ask yourself whether you want to make any changes.

 Fifth, and finally, try to write an obituary for your life, using your rules as the organizing principle for that obituary. For instance, if the golden rule might be one of your rules, your obituary might start off in a fashion like this: “The golden rule was always present in the life of (your name here), and one of the most notable examples of its importance was the time when (you did these things, or made these difficult decisions).

 So if you are interested in this, please see me at the door, and I’ll have copies of these instructions. I’ll be very interested to see what you come up with, and I think that the process itself will be of value to those of us who want to go to the next level in terms of understanding what it means for an individual to live a moral life.

Why bother with an exercise like this? First, because the life that you live makes a difference, and your understanding of what you want your life to be makes a difference in your life. It can also make a difference in your attitude toward your life.

Second, there are people in our society who act as though they “own” our society’s moral values. They don’t “own” them. But for you or me to dispute their claims effectively, we need to do at least two things. We need to be not only articulate in expressing our moral principles, we also need to be faithful in living them.

(For the instructions that Bill handed out: click here.)