For this last post of a month focused on ethics, it feels appropriate to conclude with an assertion that how we confront our history — as individuals, and as inheritors and influencers of culture — is a profoundly important ethical question.

Though there are surely longer and more complex academic treatments of the ethics of history, today I simply want to juxtapose Gary Clark Jr’s recent single, “This Land,” with a few lines from Wendell Berry’s essay “Still Standing” (1999).

Evaluating the merits of the introduction to 1930’s I’ll Take My Stand — of whose 12 authors many were sometime racists and one remained unreformed until his last breath — “Are we going to disown our forebears entirely because partly they were sinners? (Are we willing to stand judgment before our own descendants on the same terms?)”

Ethics are complex because people, history, and ideas are complex. Seeing the value in a committed racist’s idea about something other than race should give us pause.

But reappropriation is part of the game, and that’s where Gary Clark Jr’s visceral music video shows what art can do to weave the sins of the past and the situation of the present into a single complicated garment.

Like “Let America be America Again,” it’s a brave statement about our common, complex inheritance of a land, a culture, and a dream. Thank goodness that artists, philosophers, and poets still raise their voices from time to time to insist that all of that belongs to all of us.

We are none of us innocent of the past, nor will any of us be held blameless by the future. If we live such that the citizens of the future might say we knew our past and learned from it, that might be enough.

***

H/t to Texas Monthly for highlighting and praising Clark’s work.

At an event a couple of nights ago, I heard a handful of smart people make a bunch of none-too-sophisticated arguments about the state of society and democracy.

“It’s 1930s Germany!” said one.

“It’s industrial-age Britain,” countered another.

“Change is happening faster and faster,” offered the third.

“It’s not so bad — data and markets will win out,” concluded the fourth. (Over both idiocy and democracy, if I understood the argument correctly … an outcome that might be worse than the other two by quite a ways.)

I’d been looking forward to the event and left frustrated. We all know better, and we ought to act better, too.

Everyone argues in metaphors and comparisons, and that’s not about to stop. (I don’t wish that, either — if I couldn’t use metaphor, I couldn’t write!) But we can be responsible speakers and listeners by simply demanding not better facts but better comparisons.

In honor of Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, who developed this framework in Thinking in Time, let me urge that we don’t offer or accept a comparison that doesn’t come with a clear statement of the specific likenesses and differences intended in the comparison.

Better yet, we could also demand to know what’s known, unknown, and presumed in the data from which the argument is constructed.

If we can’t ask — or an author or speaker can’t answer — these deceptively simple questions, treat the argument as an emotional opinion rather than a solid, fact-based comparison.

Deliberate misinformation is indeed a problem. But 90 minutes of shoddy comparisons made and (apparently) accepted by people who think they’re smarter than that isn’t much of a step on the road to truth.

Who’s responsible for making better choices?

Institutions — companies, governments, organizations, even the culture — have enormous power to shape the context in which everyone else operates. That’s why it’s important that founders, managers, and doers at that scale have their ethics as squared away as possible before they take on their big role.

And, since we can’t always trust that that’s going to be true (you never know when a social network for spotting hot girls on campus will suddenly scale to a few billion members), it’s also worth creating a sensible, pro-social regulatory regime to ensure that creative genius (which is necessarily unpredictable) is channeled in directions that don’t harm society.

But none of this is to let any of us completely off the hook, either. We might wish there were better social networks on offer, but we have quite a bit of choice about how and how much we choose to engage with those we’ve got.

Of course some will object that companies ought to be better, or that consumer education is an oxymoron. Maybe so. But we have the corporations our culture has incentivized, permitted, or at least tolerated. And they’re undeniably powerful: economically, politically, socially, and psychologically.

But there’s always a choice. The networks’ power is largely dependent on the permission we give them by opting into the deal they’re offering: membership only costs privacy, attention, and trust.

You might “have” to sign up, for whatever reason. But you never have to spend hours a day on there.

As long as we keep paying attention, why should we expect them to change?

***

Time capsule: This is the 100th post I’ve made on Noticings. Except for several days’ break around Thanksgiving, I’ve kept my promise to myself that I’d publish every day.

A few things I think I’ve learned:

• Three months can make a pretty strong habit.
• If you want to start a new habit, it’s worth thinking through what it’s for and how best to design for that. For example, I called this site Noticings since I wanted to start paying closer attention to my daily life, and I thought that looking for the spark of a blog post in each day might help with that. It has.
• It’s changed how I think about “good enough.” My first several blogs were very occasional and invariably waaaay too long. That’s what happens when you try to do three months’ worth of noticing in one giant post. In 100 daily posts, I’ve found the discipline of everyday practice, the subtler satisfaction of covering all I want to cover by treating just one item each day, and the freedom to accept when enough is enough for one day.
• This habit has helped create other good habits, such as much more consistent (and also much shorter) daily journaling and a (deeply imperfect) mindfulness practice.
• Even though I’m admittedly still mostly in the cat blog stage (i.e. blog-as-diary), clicking the “publish” button every day is really different from journaling for myself. And I’m OK with investing several months in playing with the form, topics, and voice before trying to reach more people.

By now, the story of Enron’s corporate ethic is well known: the company chiseled its values into the stone walls of its lobby, and employees walked past those words morning and night until the day the company failed.

That’s why we begin with ethics: until you’re clear on them, you can’t proceed to economics, politics, or beyond — and being clear on your ethics is never as simple as choosing the words (even if you carve them in stone).

Aristotle taught this way. The Buddha taught this way. Most of our great teachers, ancient and modern, teach this way: before fixing your neighbor — or your bank account, or your representatives — ensure you have removed the log from your own eye.

Ethics themselves are actions more than words, and (as Aristotle well knew) habits even more than actions.

What principles have you (or should you) write down?

Which ones might you be walking past every day?

Nature abhors a monoculture.

Planting and harvesting the same crop, year after year, exhausts the soil. Yet the industrialists keep doing it — first because they can (with the help of chemicals and money to suspend the laws of nature for a little while), and second because it’s what they know how to do.

They themselves have become a monoculture: when industrial farming is made to be the only economically viable option, everyone eats Monsanto.

Mass culture is the same way. Whether you’re buying the same ironically “alternative” fast fashion as everyone else or pinning all your hopes on the next presidential election, you’re looking for nourishment from “Food”®, not real food.

Presidents don’t fill potholes. They don’t take out the trash. And they don’t know (or care) all that much about the specifics of you and your place.

They can’t — and that’s not really what they’re for, anyway. Leaders can set the tone, choose the issues, and frame the debate, and all of that matters immensely.

But think very, very carefully before trying to scale what’s unique and cool about your neck of the woods to become everyone’s monoculture.

When you deplore them and they abhor you, nobody wins.

This past week, news came out that a student posted a picture of herself doing something extremely insensitive on a social network.

The president’s office shared the news with a university-wide email condemning the behavior and promising a thorough investigation and appropriate discipline for any and all violations of policy.

Personally, I can’t think of a good excuse for what the student was doing, and I certainly can’t think of a good reason to post a picture of oneself demonstrating such poor and offensive judgement.

But I also can’t help thinking, Where are her parents? I don’t know anything about the student or her family, and I’m not asking. What I am asking is why such bad behavior should be seen and punished as a violation of university policy.

Specifically, what chain of events or ideas led to this behavior, who was harmed, and how likely is it that university discipline will re-establish right relationship between the student and herself, her peers, or society?

I can’t help wondering why we expect universities to act en loco parentis (or police?) in this way, and whether that’s really serving anybody other than the PR people.

Of course it’s wrong and embarrassing. Of course it’s bad press.

Investigations and discipline might get us through this unpleasant moment in the spotlight, but I wonder if they’ll really help us make the most of an especially painful — and hence valuable — teachable moment.

“Busy is a decision.”

So says the amazingly talented Debbie Millman, and I’ve been sitting with that idea ever since I heard it.

Of course busy isn’t a decision all the time, for every person. Probably not for the single parent working two jobs, desperate to make ends meet. And maybe not when your boss dumps something absolutely howlingly urgent on your desk.

But it’s worth investigating where and when busy is more of a decision than you think. Are you consistently able to show up on time and with enough energy to meet your commitments? Are you able to focus on a person or task long enough to respond generously and effectively? Do you start climbing the walls if you haven’t checked your email, calendar, or social networks in five minutes — or maybe just two?

All of these are symptomatic of something: lack of control, lack of responsibility, eagerness to please (regardless of efficacy).

If you’re reading this, you have some control over how you spend your time and attention. Spending them better on fewer tasks — mindfully rather than busily — is often the more generous option, both for you and for those you seek to serve.

Sharing is a permission relationship: when I share something with you, do I have permission to do that? And after I’ve shared it with you, what kind of permission have I given you as to what to do with it next?

We’re more familiar with the problem of oversharing in the form of that person who doesn’t know when to stop. This often happens when people don’t navigate context effectively: what you share with your friends, your partner, or your therapist is not completely appropriate to the workplace. That’s not to deny the reality of your experience, or its importance for how you show up in the workplace — but it is to say that you need to take responsibility for how you teach people what they need to know about you.

The other problem of oversharing is what happens afterward. When you share that much, do you mean to give everyone who listens permission to re-share what you’ve said? Do you want us to have this window into your life? And, for those of us on the receiving end, how are we supposed to make sense of this new information?

Openness, honesty, and trust are precious commodities. Be sure to earn and keep them in what you choose to share and how.

When we find something that works, we naturally want to scale it: make it bigger, apply it to different problems in different contexts.

Sometimes that’s a good idea. Doing more pushups (or eating fewer cookies) each day is likely to scale well.

But scale shouldn’t always be the goal. A technique that works in developed-world consulting might not fit a developing-country context. A “best practice” developed in one village might not work in the next valley over.

Helping ourselves and others to do more of what really works might be a good idea. But simply doing more of what we know how to do to other people might not be very helpful at all.

“[T]he day is long and the work is great and we’re not commanded to finish the work, but neither are we allowed to desist from it.”

— Arnold Eisen, quoting a favorite passage of his and Rabbi Heschel’s from the Talmud (via On Being)

***

Our modern culture doesn’t do well with the idea of joining a project in midstream, helping out as we can, and leaving before the work is complete.

We optimize, project-manage, and Get Things Done. We cross items off of our lists. We like completion. We like the credit that comes with it.

Our wisdom traditions know better. The world — and the work — existed before any of us got here, and they will exist long after we are gone.

“We’re not commanded to finish the work:” we don’t have to take projects so small as to ensure completion, regardless of efficacy. And we don’t have to ram big projects to completion, regardless of externalities or downstream harm.

“But neither are we allowed to desist from it:” complexity and compromise are facts of life, and can’t be used as excuses to hide from the work. Better to help advance the Sagrada Familia than to add a few more twigs to our own lean-to just because it is ours, or we can declare completion.

Perhaps great works are never really finished. Perhaps that’s part of what makes them great.

Perhaps we could give ourselves permission to begin — even and especially when we can’t finish the work alone.