At certain moments in my life, I followed what I considered to be the right – or the better – course, regardless of the foreseeable consequences.
One of these had to do with my vote in a consequential election for chairman of the philosophy department where I was an assistant professor. The department was small enough to make transparently clear who had voted for whom. One of the two candidates appeared to me (and to most other junior faculty) better qualified than his rival. But his competitor had the backing of colleagues who were larger in numbers and higher in professorial rank.
Though I, and most other junior colleagues, were aware that we risked our jobs, all of us who saw the stakes as I did voted as our consciences required. And, promptly, we all got fired.
Though most of us stayed friends throughout the long ordeal – even after it had played out to the finish – I turned out to be the only survivor. It took a seven-year struggle, but at the end I was reinstated in the same department that had fired me, this time reinstated with tenure (job security). My representative at the faculty union told me they’d never had a client who worked as hard as I did.
Well, I don’t like to walk away from a fight – at least not before I know beyond any doubt that I’ve lost. At that point, I can walk away. But I agree with Aristotle when he says, in his Metaphysics,
All men (people) by nature desire to know.
I tell the story in “God and the Care for One’s Story,” the closing chapter of my book, A Good Look at Evil.
There is another story, less tellable perhaps, that nevertheless I would put in the same category. In a dialogue that Plato wrote, called in English The Republic, Socrates raises the question of whether the Just Man is happier than the Unjust, even if the Just has been horribly tortured, blinded, vilified and wrongly condemned as unjust by his contemporaries. The Republic is written to answer that question. After extensive argument, it turns out that the Just Man is (in a certain sense) happier than the Unjust Man. For me, there came a time in my life when that question was not merely a hypothetical one.
The question arose at a moment in my life when I found myself rather alone. My parents had died. I was divorced. Although by now I had a tenured job, many of my former personal protections had dropped away. In that context, with no one in a position to provide a buffer, there was someone in my life who was well placed and strongly motivated to try to control me. In my new solitude, this person saw the opportunity. I saw it too, and understood that resistance to the project of controlling me had to be mounted if in future I was to secure any life worth having.
When my would-be controller saw that I was set on resistance, the person thus frustrated used considerable personal talents – of charm, intelligence, and persuasive pathos – to win over many of the friends then in my life: the older ones inherited from my parents, even a few professional friends – including one collegial friend who’d been very dear to me. My sense of betrayal and isolation were likely contributing factors in the cancer that followed.
About the cancer, I remember saying, with the deepest bitterness, to the closest of these former philosophic friends, that I would try to survive the cancer – not because I wanted to live – but because I felt I had a duty to do so!
As it turned out, I didn’t die of the cancer. And by now, it’s rare that either of these two testing situations come to mind. The reinstatement case was resolved by the relevant due process. There eventually, over time, collegial normality and good feeling revived.
The second case played out differently. The friendships lost were not repaired. The breach had been personal and the persons themselves were changed. Where briefly I tried to change them back to how they’d been “before,” I did not succeed. Having my physical survival to protect, I gave it up. So we all moved on. The broken places never got fixed. Nevertheless, I proved able to follow my own further course in life.
That is, I was able until the other night, when I woke before dawn to see all those broken places passing in review – all the unrepaired wounds – as if each cut were still fresh!
Somewhat later, still agitated, I sat for morning prayer and meditation. But even these did not work to calm my mind. I prayed, laying the bitter memories on God’s knees and asking for help. Silence. No response that I could sense. Next I tried what Patanjali, in his Yoga Sutras, calls stilling “the thought-waves of the mind.” That didn’t work either. But finally one suggestion occurred to me, perhaps in answer to the earlier prayer.
I decided to try to imagine what it must have been like for each of the former friends to believe damaging reports about a woman who’d trusted their friendship and of whom they personally knew no evil. Since all this was done in the privacy of my room, I was unimpeded by objections to the effect that no one can know the mind of another. Having made use of this kind of knowing to calm unruly students – I knew for a fact that such empathic exercises could be both effective and accurate. As a teacher, I hadn’t done it often. But I had reason to trust it as a method for extreme cases. Perhaps in real life,
we all know more about each other
than we pretend.
Anyway, still sitting for meditation, I paid brief, empathic visits to the inner life of each former friend. What I saw, what each had in common, was interesting.
First, they each knew more of the truth of the matter than they’d let on to me.
Second, to escape any moral unease, they’d spread a concealing cover overhead. To me, it looked like a canvas cover. It dimmed the colors, though they continued in muted degree to shine through the canvas.
So, in at least one sense, Plato was right. The Just person is happier. Because, for the Unjust, something is lost that belongs to happiness:
the true colors,
and among them
the blue of the sky.
Related Content: A Good Look at Evil | God and the Care for One’s Story | The Thrill of Admiration | Are the Stories We Live True? | The Eternal Feminine | Podcast: Evil? What Do You Mean, ‘Evil’?
