How to be, that is the question.
I was raised by divorced parents. I lived with my mother, a practicing Catholic, and visited my father, a free mason, on school vacations. I learned at an early age to live in a world where people have different beliefs. From my mother, I learned about the Ten Commandments, the Gospels, and the Bible. My father told me the Golden Rule was all I needed to know and warned me about the Jesuits whose maxim was:“Give me a child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” I am thankful for both. It taught me to think for myself at an early age.
I read a lot. The more I read, the more I realize that no one has all the answers, never will, and that’s a good thing. Take the Golden Rule. There are two versions. The positive version is: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The negative version is:“Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself.” The negative version tells you what not to do: Don’t steal, don’t humiliate, don’t injure, don’t deceive. The positive version is morally richer but riskier. It pushes you not merely to avoid harm, but to initiate kindness, generosity, justice, hospitality, forgiveness, or aid. Some people may prefer to be left alone. In that case your intervention, well meaning as it might be, may cause harm. Consider melding the two versions together: “First, do no harm. Then, where wisdom permits, actively do good.’
The Golden Rule feels “true” partly because our nervous systems are already structured to experience others as reflections of ourselves through mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are brain cells that enable us to internally model another person’s experience. They are the reason we wince when we see someone injured, feel tension when we see someone embarrassed, or smile reflexively when others smile. Mirror neurons don’t work as well with strangers, people who are different (foreigners), or people yet to be born. Extending the Golden Rule to others seems to require culture, imagination, symbols, stories, and conscious ethical reflection, not merely neural mirroring. (Think of the parable of the Good Samaritan.)
I became acquainted with William Blake in high school. That was the first time I really dug into the question of “How To Be.” I not only love Blake’s poems of Innocence and Experience but also much of his other work including Auguries of Innocence and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I have never had the kind of visions Blake had but his aphorisms speak to me as few others do.
“I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man’s.” (from Jerusalem)
“One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.” (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
“Without Contraries is no progression.” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
“Energy is Eternal Delight.” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
Politics, religion, morality, art, economics, and psychology all stem from how we perceive reality. Dead perception creates dead systems, narrow perception creates oppression, mechanistic perception turns humans into objects, imaginative perception restores aliveness. Blake was a visionary and he valued imagination above all. Blake’s deepest concern was preservation of imaginative freedom and human wholeness. He believed human beings are imaginative and sacred, not merely economic or mechanical units. He feared all systems becoming mechanistic. He sympathized deeply with the poor, workers, children, the marginalized, and those crushed by systems of power. He was influenced by the revolutionary spirit surrounding the American Revolution, and the French Revolution in its early idealistic phase.
Blake admired Thomas Paine, another radical of that time. Paine had his own strong opinions about “How to be.”
“My own mind is my church.” (The Age of Reason)
“The world is my country,
all mankind are my brethren,
and to do good is my religion.” (The Rights Of Man)
Paine’s quotes are morally inspiring because they combine personal freedom, universal compassion, and practical ethics.
The weakness is Paine’s ethical system depends heavily on enlightened conscience actually functioning well. History shows humans are capable of self-deception even while believing they are “doing good.” Still, as a moral guide, Paine’s statement remains remarkably powerful because it tries to preserve individuality without selfishness, universalism without dogma, and morality without authoritarianism. It is, in many ways, one of the noblest formulations of secular ethical humanism.
Paine rejects the idea that moral truth must come through priests, institutions, dogma, and inherited tradition. Conscience becomes internal rather than ecclesiastical. This connects directly to William Blake’s: “I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man’s.”
“Know thyself” said Socrates and “the unexamined life is not worth living.” I would humbly change this to “know thyself and know the other.” “Know thyself” is fundamentally a discipline against unconsciousness while “know the other” extends this moral consciousness outward. “Know thyself” preserves conscience and authenticity. “Know the other” preserves empathy and humility. This is a far more difficult morality than rule following, but perhaps a more human one.
Another ethic to consider is an honest “I don’t know” as Wisława Szymborska says in her 1996 Nobel speech or the “open channel” that Richard Feynman writes about in his book The Meaning Of It All. “I don’t know” is the beginning of vitality, curiosity, creativity, and humanity itself. Szymborska contrasts it with rigid certainty. For Szymborska, the world remains alive precisely because it is never fully closed by final answers. “I don’t know” becomes not weakness but openness to reality. Feynman repeatedly defends as intellectually and morally essential. In The Meaning Of It All, his ideal of keeping an “open channel” means resisting the temptation to prematurely seal reality inside dogma whether religious, political, ideological or even scientific. Feynman believed civilization depends on preserving the freedom to doubt.
Uncertainty alone is insufficient. Total skepticism can paralyze action. Should we oppose cruelty, defend rights, prevent violence, protect children? Saying “I don’t know” when confronted with moral choices like these is a cop out. We must do our best to act morally while remaining aware of our fallibility. The “open channel” allows for correction, otherness, imagination, compassion, and realities beyond our own comprehension. Like Camus’s Sisyphus, we shouldn’t give up, we should imagine carrying the rock happily.
I could go on and on but I don’t want to fall into George Bernard Shaw’s quip about economists: “If all the economists were laid end to end they would never reach a conclusion.” I’ll stop with one more thought from John Fowles who wrote what may be the best summary of what I’ve been circling around. In responding to a letter asking about the meaning of his famous novel The Magus, he wrote:
Reality, human existence, is infinitely baffling. One gets one explanation – the Christian, the psychological, the scientific … but always it gets burnt off like summer mist and a new landscape-explanation appears. The one valid reality or principle for us lies in eleutheria – freedom. Accept that man has the possibility of a limited freedom, and if this is so, he must be responsible for his actions. To be free (which means rejecting all the gods and political creeds and the rest) leaves one no choice but to act according to reason: that is, humanely to all humans.