Wisdom III – A Personal Good

I don’t remember the name of my Grade 7 Social Studies teacher. Does that make me a bad person?

Well, I don’t remember much of her class, either

But there was one fantastic lesson in that class, and I sincerely wish that, at the time, I’d recognized what she was really saying. It went something like this:

“Everyone has a system of values, and they make decisions based off these values.”

Hmm… Now that I type it, it doesn’t seem like a big thing. Back in Grade 7 Social Studies, I sure didn’t think it was a big thing. But if you poke at it a little bit, what my teacher was saying turns out to be a very big thing indeed.

What are values? Well, they are things which are important to us. What does it mean that they are important to us? Well… we think they are better than other things. They are near and dear to us; we are fond of them.

They are the things we think are good.

Assigning values is an exercise in determining which values are better than others, which ones are good. Isn’t that nifty, that people have different opinions on which things are good and which are bad?

What my teacher did not tell me was why we have systems of values. She didn’t go into the history to explain how our systems of values came about.

Which is kind of important, because every single thing we do throughout our entire lives is determined by how we answer the question, “What is good?”.

The Bible presents an interesting history of our values system, which is, that very early on, man decided to try and answer the question “What is good?” himself, and that decision is directly responsible for every piece of human suffering present in the world today. We have tried to carve out a personal good and it is catastrophic.

My teacher never mentioned to me that choosing what to value was the most important thing I would ever do in my entire life. Because we choose our values. And there is nothing that we do which is not intimately related to what things we perceive as good.

So how do we choose?

Is Kurt Vonnegut someone you should listen carefully to?

I dunno, but he says this (read the whole article sometime, it’s a great piece on narrative):

But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

And if I die—God forbid—I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, “Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?”

Is James Gosling someone you should listen carefully to?

I dunno, but he says this (about corporate behaviour):

It’s not so much that the game favors evil, but that the definition of “good” is really twisted:
Good adj: anything which increases the stock price.
Considerations about employees, products, customers and community are all secondary. They only enter the equation as ways to achieve goal 1. Morality or high principles have no place in the corporate discourse.

The reason we can’t define the word is so simple, so sad.

We really don’t know what it means.