There's a lot to be said for working out your values and living deliberately in accordance with them. However, life doesn't reliably put us in clear cut situations where it's obvious what the right choice is. Sometimes there is no clear choice and every option we consider will have the potential to cause harm. All you can do is weigh up what you know of the risks and try to pick the best path through it all.
Being honourable doesn't mean getting everything right. It isn't the quest for a set of values that work as fixed rules in all situations. I'm really wary of the kinds of five minute spirituality tips that suggest there is a single answer to apply to all things. There isn't. Not least because none of us knows what every potential future could be and we can't pick a path with any confidence about how that might go.
Being honourable is about trying to make the best choices you can. It also kicks in when things go wrong, and in how we try and set things right once we've messed up. It's often the case that messing up provides a lot of information about how better choices would have looked. There's always some scope to learn and improve, and the honourable choice is often the one that has us learning, restoring and improving things.
That said, sometimes the honourable choice is to pause, heal, lick your wounds and get your shit together. Running in to fix things when you're in trouble, burned out or otherwise not coping does not guarantee good results. Sometimes it is better to draw a few breaths first and take a proper look at things.
I don't think there's much scope for acting honourably unless you can also be compassionate. If all we're doing is acting out a set of arbitrary rules, without nuance or care, then sooner or later that becomes a stick to beat someone with. That might be all about getting to beat yourself up over mistakes made. It might be the means to be judgemental when other people mess up. As none of us are omniscient it is an absolute certainty that everyone will mess up. We can hold each other to high standards while being compassionate about our human shortcomings.
Very few people are out there trying to be evil. Most people think that what they do makes some kind of sense. A lot of people try hard to get things right. It's important to recognise that someone's idea of getting things right can be informed by radically different perspectives. Sometimes those people urgently need educating on an issue, and sometimes they need more empathy from others, and we all have to just figure this out as we go along. The choice to protect someone may look like taking power from them. The choice to let someone make their own mistakes may look like needlessly exposing someone to harm. There are no tidy answers most of the time.
No matter how hard we try, we're inevitably going to fall short of our own ideals sometimes. That's not a reason to avoid having high standards. It is however really important to think about how to handle things when we fall short of our own expectations. And for that matter how to approach things when other people fall short. An honour system that doesn't allow for complexity or for situations where there are no good choices to be made, is inevitably going to be brutal. I can't see that making honour systems so rigid that we are bound to fail is a course that serves anyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment