The Moral Bucket List
When
I meet such a person it brightens my whole day. But I confess I often
have a sadder thought: It occurs to me that I’ve achieved a decent level
of career success, but I have not achieved that. I have not achieved
that generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.
A
few years ago I realized that I wanted to be a bit more like those
people. I realized that if I wanted to do that I was going to have to
work harder to save my own soul. I was going to have to have the sort of
moral adventures that produce that kind of goodness. I was going to
have to be better at balancing my life.
It
occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues
and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to
the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about
at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were
you capable of deep love?
We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.
But
if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts
of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It
is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade
yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not
obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K.
But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest
meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap
opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and
those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.
I
came to the conclusion that wonderful people are made, not born — that
the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built
slowly from specific moral and spiritual accomplishments.
If
we wanted to be gimmicky, we could say these accomplishments amounted
to a moral bucket list, the experiences one should have on the way
toward the richest possible inner life. Here, quickly, are some of them:
THE HUMILITY SHIFT
We live in the culture of the Big Me. The meritocracy wants you to
promote yourself. Social media wants you to broadcast a highlight reel
of your life. Your parents and teachers were always telling you how
wonderful you were.
But
all the people I’ve ever deeply admired are profoundly honest about
their own weaknesses. They have identified their core sin, whether it is
selfishness, the desperate need for approval, cowardice,
hardheartedness or whatever. They have traced how that core sin leads to
the behavior that makes them feel ashamed. They have achieved a
profound humility, which has best been defined as an intense
self-awareness from a position of other-centeredness.
SELF-DEFEAT
External success is achieved through competition with others. But
character is built during the confrontation with your own weakness.
Dwight Eisenhower, for example, realized early on that his core sin was
his temper. He developed a moderate, cheerful exterior because he knew
he needed to project optimism and confidence to lead. He did silly
things to tame his anger. He took the names of the people he hated,
wrote them down on slips of paper and tore them up and threw them in the
garbage. Over a lifetime of self-confrontation, he developed a mature
temperament. He made himself strong in his weakest places.
THE DEPENDENCY LEAP
Many people give away the book “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” as a
graduation gift. This book suggests that life is an autonomous journey.
We master certain skills and experience adventures and certain
challenges on our way to individual success. This individualist
worldview suggests that character is this little iron figure of
willpower inside. But people on the road to character understand that no
person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own. Individual will,
reason and compassion are not strong enough to consistently defeat
selfishness, pride and self-deception. We all need redemptive assistance
from outside.
People
on this road see life as a process of commitment making. Character is
defined by how deeply rooted you are. Have you developed deep
connections that hold you up in times of challenge and push you toward
the good? In the realm of the intellect, a person of character has
achieved a settled philosophy about fundamental things. In the realm of
emotion, she is embedded in a web of unconditional loves. In the realm
of action, she is committed to tasks that can’t be completed in a single
lifetime.
ENERGIZING LOVE
Dorothy Day led a disorganized life when she was young: drinking,
carousing, a suicide attempt or two, following her desires, unable to
find direction. But the birth of her daughter changed her. She wrote of
that birth, “If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest
symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most
exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I
did when they placed my child in my arms.”
That
kind of love decenters the self. It reminds you that your true riches
are in another. Most of all, this love electrifies. It puts you in a
state of need and makes it delightful to serve what you love. Day’s love
for her daughter spilled outward and upward. As she wrote, “No human
creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I
often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to
worship, to adore.”
She
made unshakable commitments in all directions. She became a Catholic,
started a radical newspaper, opened settlement houses for the poor and
lived among the poor, embracing shared poverty as a way to build
community, to not only do good, but be good. This gift of love overcame,
sometimes, the natural self-centeredness all of us feel.
THE CALL WITHIN THE CALL
We all go into professions for many reasons: money, status, security.
But some people have experiences that turn a career into a calling.
These experiences quiet the self. All that matters is living up to the
standard of excellence inherent in their craft.
Frances
Perkins was a young woman who was an activist for progressive causes at
the start of the 20th century. She was polite and a bit genteel. But
one day she stumbled across the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, and
watched dozens of garment workers hurl themselves to their deaths rather
than be burned alive. That experience shamed her moral sense and
purified her ambition. It was her call within a call.
After
that, she turned herself into an instrument for the cause of workers’
rights. She was willing to work with anybody, compromise with anybody,
push through hesitation. She even changed her appearance so she could
become a more effective instrument for the movement. She became the
first woman in a United States cabinet, under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and
emerged as one of the great civic figures of the 20th century.
THE CONSCIENCE LEAP
In most lives there’s a moment when people strip away all the branding
and status symbols, all the prestige that goes with having gone to a
certain school or been born into a certain family. They leap out beyond
the utilitarian logic and crash through the barriers of their fears.
The
novelist George Eliot (her real name was Mary Ann Evans) was a mess as a
young woman, emotionally needy, falling for every man she met and being
rejected. Finally, in her mid-30s she met a guy named George Lewes.
Lewes was estranged from his wife, but legally he was married. If Eliot
went with Lewes she would be labeled an adulterer by society. She’d lose
her friends, be cut off by her family. It took her a week to decide,
but she went with Lewes. “Light and easily broken ties are what I
neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically. Women who
are satisfied with such ties do not act as I have done,” she wrote.
She
chose well. Her character stabilized. Her capacity for empathetic
understanding expanded. She lived in a state of steady, devoted love
with Lewes, the kind of second love that comes after a person is older,
scarred a bit and enmeshed in responsibilities. He served her and helped
her become one of the greatest novelists of any age. Together they
turned neediness into constancy.
Commencement speakers are always telling young people to follow their passions. Be true to yourself. This is a vision of life that begins with self and ends with self. But people on the road to inner light do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? They ask, what is life asking of me? How can I match my intrinsic talent with one of the world’s deep needs?
Their
lives often follow a pattern of defeat, recognition, redemption. They
have moments of pain and suffering. But they turn those moments into
occasions of radical self-understanding — by keeping a journal or making
art. As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and
reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.
The
people on this road see the moments of suffering as pieces of a larger
narrative. They are not really living for happiness, as it is
conventionally defined. They see life as a moral drama and feel
fulfilled only when they are enmeshed in a struggle on behalf of some
ideal.
This
is a philosophy for stumblers. The stumbler scuffs through life, a
little off balance. But the stumbler faces her imperfect nature with
unvarnished honesty, with the opposite of squeamishness. Recognizing her
limitations, the stumbler at least has a serious foe to overcome and
transcend. The stumbler has an outstretched arm, ready to receive and
offer assistance. Her friends are there for deep conversation, comfort
and advice.
External
ambitions are never satisfied because there’s always something more to
achieve. But the stumblers occasionally experience moments of joy.
There’s joy in freely chosen obedience to organizations, ideas and
people. There’s joy in mutual stumbling. There’s an aesthetic joy we
feel when we see morally good action, when we run across someone who is
quiet and humble and good, when we see that however old we are, there’s
lots to do ahead.
The
stumbler doesn’t build her life by being better than others, but by
being better than she used to be. Unexpectedly, there are transcendent
moments of deep tranquillity. For most of their lives their inner and
outer ambitions are strong and in balance. But eventually, at moments of
rare joy, career ambitions pause, the ego rests, the stumbler looks out
at a picnic or dinner or a valley and is overwhelmed by a feeling of
limitless gratitude, and an acceptance of the fact that life has treated
her much better than she deserves.
Those are the people we want to be.
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