Friday February 3, 2023; 10:38 AM EST
- You hear once in a while, don't you?, that almost all religions have somewhere in their holy texts a verse that (roughly) says, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." A child could easily memorize this on her walk to grade school, and then put it out of mind. Yet you also hear once in a while that this sentence holds sufficient wisdom to renovate the wide world, if only we would take it to heart. After all, lucky us, most of us know some version of it by heart already.#
- Let's for the moment agree, can we?, that wisdom that enters the wider world through memorization heads out on its journey nearly empty of value. As Richard Pryor said, "Null and void." And people being people, we often do our best to drain the best things of their value.#
- In Tom Sawyer, the entrepreneurial young hero persuades neighborhood children to trade their favorite toys and treasures for the chance to whitewash the wooden fence. Intuiting that there is nothing that cannot be turned into a capital market and exploited for personal gain, he trades those toys and treasures for the paper tickets many of these same children had earned by memorizing verses from the Bible. Having acquired sufficient number of these tickets, representing two thousand memorized verses, he cashes them in for a gaudy Bible. All this from the lad who we see choosing to attempt to memorize a passage from "The Sermon on the Mount" because it contained the fewest words per verse.#
- So let's also agree, can we?, that there's nothing that capitalism does not have it within its power to pervert.#
- Yet maybe we still admire the wise saying: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." What steps are required to bring meaning back to a sentence drained of value by empty habit and memorization, or corrupted by being transformed into capital?#
- How can a person look past the memorized words to something still alive there? For one thing, the verse asks for each person to make a judgment. Activate your brain and heart and ask what you'd want in the way of treatment by others, the verse instructs. We could answer that with more memorized words or, better, we can say, "No, no, I'm going to think this through." We'd have to turn to history, personal and otherwise, to continue thinking. When I've been treated this way or that, or when someone else has been treated one way or another, how did it feel? What did we think about the treatment?#
- The sentence demands that a person make a moral inquiry based on human experience, then come to a personal judgment. (Or else find some other memorized answer to cling to. Please don't.)#
- And having inquired and made a moral judgment, the sentence makes one more demand: Behave! Do that moral thing yourself, the one you thought up for yourself, based on your own scrutiny of life. Do that very thing. Don't turn back to authorities or rote verses. You thought it through yourself; now go do it.#
- So how do we get past the emptiness of memorized wisdom and the corruption into which it sometimes falls? Inquire for yourself into human experience, evaluate for yourself what you find there and what would make you grieve or celebrate if it happened to you, and upon the foundation of your own moral inquiry, go out into the world and act accordingly. This, says the next sentence in the Christian New Testament, this is the essence of the wisdom of all the holy books that have come down to us.#
- I turned to this verse because I'm interested not in canonical Christianity but because I'm interested in how words come to life when we use them properly. And when we don't use words properly, they will in time come to excuse our mediocrity and our worst deeds.#