Are there any general principles, which will help me to live well?
I think there are four:
- to have a policy of strategic optimism
- to be tender to whatever is living and growing
- to be fair, and
- to engage in any situation with its own peculiarity, its unique pattern.
The law of strategic optimism
Life is inherently hopeful. Life is always living forward. In any situation, pessimism is a kind of betrayal. The pessimist is half-way to defeat. The person who looks for a way through, who trusts that there will be a way through, is going to survive and prosper.
On that journey, the good is the enemy of the best. If we are ever to come home, we will have to resist the sirens – all those voices calling us to good things, which are not what we truly want.
Pessimism is an insult to life.
– John Dewey
Think positively, because it works. This is a strategic optimism – neither animal buoyancy, nor sentimentality, nor empty metaphysics.
Life may be bitter, grim, tragic and unrelenting. Especially at such times, we learn the value of the enduring heart.
The first law of integrity reads:
THINK POSITIVELY
The law of tenderness
It is easy to dry up, to shrivel, to get trapped in rules and formulas, to become narrow, rigid, safe, tough, critical, brittle and anti-life. We have to pass beyond these limitations.
The hard man is the friend of death;
the gentle person is a friend to life.
– Lao Tzu
We need to be open, tender, generous, passionate, supple, daring and inventive. Life is sacred – demanding of us a resourcefulness which wells up from the depths of our being.
A response, from everything in us which is open-hearted and merciful, to whatever is green and new, to whatever is frail and vulnerable, to whatever is honest and courageous, to whatever calls to us from the depth of life for reciprocity, justice and compassion.
The second law of integrity reads:
RESPOND TO LIFE
The law of justice
It is crucial to have a warm heart. And a warm heart is not enough. Also, we need to use our heads, to build on our natural sense of what is fair.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
– Martin Luther King
Integrity is founded in the instinctive values of children – in attachment to individuals and elemental fairness.
The sense of fairness is, I think, primitive in us. It is simply part of human nature.
It is vital to understand how deeply ethical reflection is embedded in our language; to realise there is a gulf between what we think we value, and what indeed we do value; to try to discover what is right, rather than merely what feels right; and to reflect on the complexities which underlie that difference.
For justice to be done in any situation, however, we need to have access to specific raw materials:
- the stories, feelings and perspectives of all the people involved
- factual information about the situation, and
- an ability to stand outside the situation, reflectively.
Given these raw materials, we may be able to weigh the different factors, to see the underlying pattern, and to discern the just way to proceed.
Above all, it is vital not to betray what we know to be just – whether out of submission to wealth or power, or for fear of consequences, or because we are subject to pressure from those around us, or because an unjust state of affairs is embedded in the social structure – or for any other reason whatsoever.
The path of justice is not easy.
Nevertheless, the third law of integrity reads:
BE FAIR TO EVERYBODY
The law of context
What I am most concerned to do is to call attention
to the complexity of the ethical situation.
Whether he likes it or not,
Nero is within the wider situation.
The question which confronts him is whether
in this definite situation
it is better to stop fiddling
and put out the fire.
—Susan Stebbing
We have to bring several kinds of sensitivity to bear – emotional, ethical and practical. We have to avoid forcing any set of fixed rules or principles onto a situation.
Every situation has its own particularity, its unique configuration.
Nice distinctions are troublesome.
It is so much easier to say that your neighbour is good for nothing,
than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you
to modify that opinion.
—George Eliot
The language into which you were born is rich in ways to think about life and action. The society in which a situation arises has a finely wrought pattern.
The more sensitive we are to those practical and ethical nuances which are embodied in language and custom, the more finely we will tune our actions, achieving success without stirring up needless conflict, and without compromising our self-respect – or humiliating others.
The fourth law of integrity reads:
TREAT EVERY SITUATION AS A UNIQUE PATTERN
These four laws of integrity are the foundation of the successful life as I understand it, keys to a life of love and of respect for self and others.