Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.

— Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter From a Birmingham Jail“

***

Progress is never inevitable.

But now is the time, and this is the place, and we are the people.

We may none of us get all the way to the promised land — at least not in this life. We might not even get to the mountaintop, or be granted a look over.

But we can always take another step, lift another voice, make more real the promise of democracy.

Let us march on.

Yesterday, I listened to On Being‘s extraordinary 2015 interview with the dearly departed muse, Mary Oliver.

Among the many arresting observations she makes, one line that caught me up short was: “I saved my own life.”

We all have to do that at some point, don’t we? Even with all the help and advice and instruction in the world, no one else can take the saving step for us — into the woods, along the beach, onto the page.

It’s probably a healthy thing that our culture is learning to speak more openly of the struggles and traumas that have always been there. But we can’t descend totally into blaming others or shaming ourselves — “walk[ing] on [o]ur knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.”

Sooner or later, we must address ourselves. And then, with all the support and grace and attention we can muster, save our own lives.

That’s how we claim the gifts we have to share.

***

We’ll miss you, Mary.

One of the basic tasks of any philosophy, and especially of any ethical system, is to determine and assign praise and blame.

It follows that we have to ask what is worthy of praise or blame, and what to do when confronted by circumstance — especially blameworthy actions.

One answer that seems especially popular these days is, “Who am I to judge?” After all, no one’s perfect, and right is relative.

It’s certainly true that no one’s perfect. And sometimes right is relative: are bigger or smaller houses inherently better or worse?

But both of those ideas can be pushed too far. Bigger houses probably aren’t inherently worse than smaller ones, for example, but it is objectively wrong to harm communities or habitats. “That house is too big” is a judgment of taste. “That big house uses too many resources and filled in the wetland” is a moral judgment about harm and blame.

So — who are you to judge? Possibly just the right person. Not judging might be letting yourself or the other person off of an uncomfortable but necessary hook. The trick, though, is to assign praise and blame effectively: by separating aesthetic judgments from ethical ones, and by judging actions and effects that really matter.

About a decade ago, I decided I would fulfill a dream by enrolling on a National Outdoor Leadership School field course. I spent the next six months preparing, then strapped a 60-pound pack on my back and headed out into the Wyoming wilderness with a team of 12 students and two instructors.

I learned many lessons during that month on the trail (you never know how much you’ll miss music till you go a month without iGadgets), but one that’s stuck with me forever comes from a short essay one of our instructors read to us after a big hamburger feed on our first night back in town after a month in the field.

It’s called “Briefing for Entry Into a More Harsh Environment,” and it’s been a touchstone for NOLS students since Morgan Hite wrote it in 1991. The essay lists 11 habits that are essential for survival in the wilderness, and urges students returning to the “frontcountry” to maintain them in a culture of distraction and interruption.

These 11 habits of mind boil down to living simply, challenging ourselves to keep learning, and taking care of people and things.

Those are good rules for any time and place, and Morgan correctly notes that it doesn’t take a month in the mountains to learn them.

But, as we all know, it’s also quite possible for the amount of stuff in the frontcountry to overwhelm the simple principles of survival in the wilderness. You don’t have to go all the way to Wyoming every time that happens, but it can be useful to take a hard look at our mental and physical “stuff” from time to time and determine how much we really need to be carrying.

“Enough” doesn’t always mean less, or lesser.

Sometimes, more is exactly the right answer:

• More quality
• More value
• More generosity
• More gratitude
• More abundance

Pick a few areas of life in which adding more might help you reach enough.

Then start enacting more and see what happens.

How much is enough?

How much do we really need?

It’s probably less than we think — especially when “enough” feels impossibly far away at the moment.

But here’s the thing: just like ethics, it’s important to think about “enough” before you bump up against the boundary.

Because if you start out just looking for more with no concept of what could be enough, it’s going to be hard to change the pattern long after the marginal returns have ceased to matter.

“Virtue of character [i.e., of ēthos],” writes Aristotle in Book II, Chapter 1(1) of the Nicomachean Ethics, “results from habit [ethos]; hence its name ‘ethical’, slightly varied from ‘ethos’.”

In other words, principles shape practices, and practices repeated over time (as habits) in turn shape virtue of character.

Listening to a 21st Century Creative podcast episode with entrepreneur and endurance athlete Jarie Bolanger yesterday, Jarie made a similar point: he was compelled to write an “entrepreneur’s ethos” because he hadn’t seen anyone develop a serious code of conduct for innovators.

Situational ethics matter, of course. But to know what the right thing to do is in any situation, it’s important to first grapple with the foundations of right action in general.

Actions and habits that build character and community are a great place to start.

Reading a bit of Aristotle this morning, I am reminded of the importance of prioritization.

There are, he says, many activities — each of which seeks its own good (or end). Medicine seeks health; generalship seeks victory; bridle-making seeks harnessing (which in turn seeks horsemanship).

As we confront all these actions and ends, what we are really presented with are choices. Specifically, we are asked to accurately discern which goods are the highest, and to prioritize those. If we seek health, for example, we had better pay attention to our dietary, physical, and medical pursuits. Sweets and treats are goods, but the pursuit of health ought to subordinate them to the goods of exercise and nutrition.

Ethics are a shorthand for the choices we make about which goods to pursue and how we prioritize them. And one of the easiest ways to go astray is to put lower things before higher.

Beautiful bridles complement good horsemanship, but a better bridle won’t make you a better rider. More often than not, you can’t trade money or minutiae for time in the saddle.

I’ve recently started reading (at last) Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. It’s easily one of the most provocative books/theses of 2018, for my money.

There’s plenty to explore there, but one thing that jumped out to me in the first chapter was how a young college student’s exposure to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics alerted her to one of the fundamental conundrums of the human experience: the problem of confusing means and ends.

Writing specifically about money, Aristotle notes how the pursuit of wealth for its own sake warps people and society. He does not ignore the reality or utility of money (which is threaded through the Ethics, the Economics, and the Politics); rather, he offers strong caution against directing our lives to its acquisition.

This is an old idea — surely older than Aristotle, and repackaged in modern sources from the New Testament to This is Water.

But you don’t have to look very hard to find people who seem hell-bent on being the richest guy or gal in the cemetery. Or people blinded by the pursuit of power for its own sake without any clue about what to do with it. Or even people more committed to virtue-signaling than to doing truly virtuous work — by words only when necessary.

Any ethical code that can’t usefully tell ends from means can’t have much practical use. Ditto an ethic that is silent on how to employ means in service of ends.

We all have deep ideas about ends and means. They’re worth surfacing, discerning, examining — and, if necessary, editing — from time to time.

Next time you consider making a purchase or casting a vote, ask yourself what kind of story about ends and means you’re about to endorse, and whether you’d wish that on yourself and those you care about.

Lest the last two days’ posts give the impression that progress may not be possible, it’s important to tack on a note on heretics, who have been a powerful force for progress throughout history.

This is also an excellent opportunity to direct your attention to Maria Popova’s treatment of the “imperfect, . . . brilliant, . . . truth-see[ing]” G. K. Chesterton’s Heretics at her site, Brain Pickings.

She quotes Chesterton writing (in 1905) that “The word ‘orthodoxy’ not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong.” And though it would take much to convince me that power and privilege — in some form, held by some group(s) — will ever be totally removed from the human experience, I’m also prepared to endorse Chesterton’s view: when it comes to “orthodoxy” today, particularly as relates to upholding the status quo, to be orthodox is often to be in the wrong.

Sometimes that’s worth the compromise. Some people dedicate their lives to maintaining enough stability to allow society as a whole to evolve, and that’s laudable. And there are lunatics who would see all of society and its systems torn down either for fun or for some utopian delusion.

But then there are heretics — the sometimes loyal, sometimes not-so-loyal, almost always lonely opposition — who dare to question the conventional wisdom and the soporifics we sell ourselves as The Way Things Are.

These people exist in public and in private, and across the political spectrum. They are those who say this can’t be all there is, or this is not who we are, or I don’t think this is what we are about. That’s thankless work, and the world they call into being rarely comes into being in precisely the way they advocate.

But to completely ignore or try to silence their testimony is not only to ignore pearls of real truth, but to join a long line of less-than-illustrious figures.

Quick: can you name Galileo’s or Joan of Arc’s chief prosecutors?

Now, would you join them?