Fullest Humanity- Implications for the Ethical Life
Dialogue Australasia Conference
Melbourne, April 2003
As someone external to the teaching profession, my task today is as I see it is to bring in the external perspective that might serve to draw you back to some of the basic issues that we are often to close to see. One of the dangers that we can slip into at academic conferences is that of being too clever. Cleverness, like so much of the language, labels and trappings that we use, can exclude and divide us from each other. Intellectualising can also be a defence against actually having to honestly grapple with the emotions associated with difficult subjects.
Much of applied ethics is, in contrast, common sense and seemingly very simple. The issue of ethics arises out of the fact that as human beings we are relational creatures. Once we come up against an‘other’, whose desires and needs impinge on our own, we encounter the issue of choice. We ultimately define who we are, the sort of human being that we become, through the choices that we make. The issue of ethics must be accessible to everyone regardless of background, education, intelligence or age.
As ethicists we help people to identify and reflect on the choices that they might make by holding a mirror up to them in a way that inevitably will have the affect of bringing people home to themselves as they seek to identify all of the conscious and unconscious issues that can affect good judgement.
We do this in the world of business because economic rationalism has not worked to do the very thing that was intent on delivering- increased productivity. Economic rationalism has attempted to remove the inconvenient vagaries that come with the human dimension of our economic world by treating people as machines. What is becoming clear, however, is that human beings work better if they are happy and feel valued. The irony of our highly mechanised world is that simple values of trust and confidence are essential to its survival and success. So, in business ethics, we are having to re-teach people about how to build this trust and confidence, through behaviours and throughout their organizations. We are having to teach people to think critically, to think long term in an environment that is ruled by the short term, to think broadly and big picture when everything tells us that we should be specialising and narrowing our focus. We are having to teach people to feel comfortable with the language of values and right and wrong in a society that has all but lost this language.
So, when asked to speak at this conference I thought to myself: Great that will be an easy topic, a welcome relief from to my usual experience when working in the field of business ethics of tiptoeing around the subject of the meaning of our lives that sits a baby with a dirty nappy, in the midst of a group of people all trying to ignore it lest it ask something of them that that they are unwilling to give. Little was I prepared for the turmoil that was to follow as I tried to find a place to begin a topic that is seemingly simple but quickly grows to resemble a rubic cube of intricacy and interconnectedness, when I realised that what I was experiencing was a pretty good metaphor for the inescapable struggle that lies at the very heart of the subject of this conference…to be human is to try to make sense of that which we experience, to form it into some coherent truth by which we can live …. and that mindfulness of this struggle, and its associated emotions, is entirely appropriate.
Questions of ultimate meaning of our lives, spiritual or otherwise, lie at the frontiers of human understanding ….and always will. To quote the poet, Les Murray, when speaking about the pathos that has characterised the human religious project:
‘What humans imagine to be their own salvation cannot logically be anything greater than human measure.’ [1]
We are necessarily limited by our own human imaginations, the boundaries of our individual experience and culture, the assumptions about truth that these produce. And we are limited by the language we use to represent them with all of its inadequacy in expressing the often inexpressible. To this extent at least the study of “Who and Why we are”, what constitutes fullest humanity, is like no other subject. It has at its depth mystery, mystery of the springs and purposes of life.
If understanding the ‘why we are’, in ultimate terms, remains mystery so then does the ‘how we should be’ which is the subject of ethics. Questions of meaning and ethics are inextricably linked and very finely enmeshed. We do not do our morality in a vacuum but deeply embedded in a world view that affects how we read and interpret the landscape. A change in one’s spiritual sensibilities will inevitably affect our ethical sensibilities and vice versa. If life seems meaningless, why bother trying too hard?
As Aristotle suggested, what is good and right, the questions central to ethics, will depend on purpose. We will not choose a shovel to hammer a nail for example. This is a simple premise that certainly helps us in business ethics
where it serves to clarify the terrain by isolating the ends and then looking at preferred means as a way of shedding light on the choices that we might have in our pursuit of success, however it is to be defined. But it is a premise that throws us back into the circularity of our beliefs and behaviours, behaviours influencing beliefs, when it is applied to ultimate questions of human fulfilment. A cycle that is only to be interrupted by the lack of logic which lies at the core of the work we do, which is the dilemma of the endless fact of behaviour that is very much at odds with stated beliefs Where we espouse one thing and do quite another!
Just as all of the great religions of the world and those which are not, inevitably entered the world of ethics, as teachers of spirituality, so too must you - in what you teach, and how you teach it. They are inseparable because ‘Allah has no hands’. Consciously or unconsciously we are God’s hands in everything we do….our actions are the fruit of the spirit ….or not. So you, as teachers of religion and spirituality, are also unavoidably teachers of ethics, just as in teaching ethics I cannot avoid being thrust back into the world of meaning. We are all educators of hearts… as well as minds.
If that is to be our purpose, the end that we seek, then what are the implications for how we should proceed? What is right and good?
The discomforting thing about the ethical life is that it demands that each of us answer this question for ourselves. Our schools, religious leaders, or the Department of Education might have its own ideas, but to be ethical is to continually build the capacity to think for oneself, to choose for oneself. If that results in a clash between what you believe to be right and good and what you are being told to do by another, then you will need to look at broader issues such as the role that you are fulfilling, and whether you are being asked to compromise your own values for a higher good or not…and whether that is possible for you without significant consequences for you personally.
As one who has the temerity to call myself an ethicist, I see my role as one who walks with others, helping them to see and explore the issues…but always making their own choices. With that role, I believe, comes very special responsibility, especially with those who are young and therefore vulnerable in our hands. It is a sacred task that requires utmost respect for the freedom and autonomy of each student and the path that they alone can tread.
I find it helpful to try to remember that we areall human beings struggling. Like Jacob from the Hebrew testament, we are wrestling with God. It is too easy to lose sight of the fact that for every one of us, however much time we have spent thinking and studying and teaching, however strongly we might believe, when it comes to the world of ultimate meaning, of spirituality and ethics, we know nothing for absolutely for certain. This serves to keep a due amount of humility in the discussion. This, I believe, is essential in setting the tone, the attitude, that we need to adopt when dealing an area which has at its core Mystery, the mystery of divine meaning…or none.
Accompanied by mystery is uncertainty and ambiguity. These two factors make our subject a particularly difficult subject in a society that has little tolerance for ambiguity and likes to pretend that its laws adequately set boundaries to appropriate human conduct. One of the biggest issues that we contend with in our work is convincing people that the law provides minimum ethical positions (not being struck off being fined or imprisoned) rather than working to promote excellence or virtue. One has only to reflect on the behaviours of some of our so called leaders of business over recent times to see the level of breakdown ( if they ever existed in some quarters) of ethical sensibilities that we are now encountering in many parts of society as a result of this attitude. The recent unprecedented corporate collapses and defalcations in the midst of an incredibly complex business world, are at last beginning to make some inroads into the belief that if it is legal it is necessarily ok. Not to mention the issues that we face internationally. There seems to me to be an increased level of awareness of the depth of the complexity of the Middle East issues and the complicity of the West in the historical lead up to the present situation, that defies simple black and white judgements or solutions.
Uncertainty is inherent in the human condition but some of us are better able to handle it than others. As one of my theology lecturers used to say: “Fundamentalism is a psychological stance not a religious one.” If you are a person who naturally seeks to render that which is grey more comfortable black and white, are you the one to be teaching this subject? Are you able to make yourself vulnerable, to walk with your students on a journey inward that has no destination that can be easily defined or measured, and is different for everyone of us according to who we most particularly are? Are you equipped with the necessary emotional intelligence to facilitate a journey that must included every aspect of a student’s human experience, emotional, intellectual, psychological as well as the spiritual and from which you cannot remain detached? Putting it this way, I suspect most of us would say ‘no’ but I do not believe this means that you must be a trained psychiatrist or any other specialist… just a human being who is prepared to own their own humanness with all of the limitations that implies. In ethics, self awareness is everything.
As teachers you are first and foremost modelling the process in everything you do and how you do it. This means being prepared to challenge one’s own assumptions about the way the world is and having the courage to challenge those of others. We live in a multi cultural society and a world that desperately needs to get beneath cultural and religious accretions of the ages to our common humanity if we are ever to live in peace. It is easy to stand outside and say what ‘they’ should be doing, whoever ‘they’ are, to conveniently project the enemy outside and deny the potential for evil in ourselves. It must begin with every one of us. Again, with the present international crisis there have been a plethora of questionnaires one can complete on the Internet to test whether a person has unconscious prejudices towards Muslims. Try it just to see how you fare. I have been quite stunned by my own capacity to get drawn into a ‘them and us’ dichotomy with out being aware of it. It is too easy to distance oneself from the reality of the horror, and to be sucked into a ‘world cup’ mindset of win and lose.
We need to be work constantly to close the gap between what we say we believe and what we actually do and help our students and our schools do so as well… It is here that cynicism, which is so corrosive of human ideals, is born. The spiritual journey and the ethical journey can never be isolated from how we are in our daily lives. What we really value will be evident in everything we actually do, at the personal and the organisational level.
So your schools and their systems and processes will not be immune. Check what you say in your prospectuses. We cannot say we believe in the importance of diversity and then try to channel all of our students through the same system of teaching methodologies, course program and examinations. We cannot say we care about children and then have a school so large and teachers under so much pressure that they haven’t the time to even get to know their students or to take the time just to talk to them and to each other about life. We cannot say we value individuals and then punish a student for wanting to set themselves apart in some way ( see under uniforms, hair, etc). We cannot say we believe in democracy and then want to control everything ourselves. We cannot say we believe in developing critical thinking and then be intolerant of criticism; or the development of capacity for leadership and then limit leadership positions to a chosen few, or pastoral care and ignore the deep hurt we visit on students who aspire to achieve in any manner of ways but who regularly miss out….on prefects positions, sport teams, drama productions….or fail to simply get the rewards for the effort they put in….the list is endless.
I think it was the NSW School Principal’s Association recently took the unprecedented step of publicly condemning the war in Iraq because it said that it could not remain silent in the face of aggression when its members are trying to teach their students that violence is never the answer to conflict. We all must work to close the link between what we say and what we do. We cannot say we believe that every child is from God and then only value those who are naturally gifted whether it be academic or at sport. Every child, every human being has something they can contribute to the whole. Or is that assertion just part of my own package of assumptions? Our habits, customs and long held traditions need to be regularly examined to see if they still serve our needs and the needs of the human beings we say we want our children to become.
This assumes that as teachers of religion that any of you have the power to affect anything at all of course. There exist a fascinating phenomenon in the business world wherein an organization discerns a need, so hires someone to fulfil that need and then ignores them completely. It is as though once someone has been hired that is all that is necessary. Like the lawyer or the ethicist who quickly becomes the outsourced conscience for an organization allowing the rest to get on with the so called real work unaffected by that person’s inconvenient ideas, you might similarly become the outsourced home of the spiritual and the pastoral in your schools so that the rest of the community can ignore it. In a massive phenomenon of projection you will be expected to carry whatever aspirations that members of your school community might have around the subject, but don’t expect that people should actually change the way they have always done things!
This is bad enough if you are in charge of communications in an organization that simply does not want to communicate with anyone, but in the world of the spiritual there are whole range of other subconscious issues that will come up to constrain you. Spiritual people don’t get angry, or upset people, or be rude ( however one might define that), or get tired, short tempered, play politics, want or need to be appropriately remunerated….and so on. Like clergy are expected to be poor for the rest of us, you might be expected to be saintly…some to the point of martydom!
These things need to be challenged. That takes courage and energy and the realisation that one cannot be everyone’s friend. It isn’t easy. We have come to see that the project of teaching ethics is very confronting indeed for most people. One needs to choose daily how far to push things and which fights it is worth having. Your schools stated values or objectives set out in its marketing material are very useful tools. Just keep asking questions and letting them hang in the air if necessary: If we say we believe in building compassion, integrity, honesty, respect….how should we be showing these things in this school? Forget about being perfect or having things done perfectly. Not all of us a cut out to be martyrs…or even heroes…just that we be willing to take small steps forwards…plant seed trusting that God in God’s mystery will take care of the rest. That is hard enough!
A commentator, reflecting on the religious aspects of the so called war against terrorism, said that God didn’t make man…man made God and continues to do so in his own image! And then of course we use that image to separate ourselves from each other and even worse to belt each other up! In the Christian community, we used to have a vengeful God who controlled us through fear. Most of us who think of these things at all, no longer believe in such a God. We believe in a loving God who has given us our freedom to think and to choosefor ourselves. God hasn’t changed, just our notions of God have changed. What is it that St Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “ When I was a child, I used to talk like a child and see things as a child does and think like a child”.[2] As we grow to adulthood we understand more….and there is a great deal more to understand. As human beings we can “know only imperfectly” …such is the way with faith.