For The Bohol Tribune
In This Our Journey
NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS
The Lenten season, which started on Ash Wednesday last week as part of
a 40-day observance of the sufferings of Jesus Christ prior to resurrection, is
a great time to think about the Good Life. Aside from readings on daily reflections,
I retrieved from the shelf the book
entitled “The Good Life,” written by Hugh Mackay, noted Australian author.
The book was sent as Christmas gift in 2013 by my former high school
classmate and close friend, Sydney-based Milwida Sevilla-Reyes. More as impulse
rather than a deliberate act, I pulled out the book in haste to see if it could
help me provide some fresh insights on how to be good at a time when morality
seems to be under savage and relentless attacks at all fronts.
Let me share with you some of these insights from a noted
psychologist, a newspaper columnist for 25 years and a professor at the
University of Wollongong.
On the word “Good”, the author
says that like the word “love” it has “many possible connotations.” He says that ‘Good time’, has almost no relation to the
idea of being good.
He adds: “Good food, good party, good job, good journey, good
conversation, Good Friday: same
adjective, many shades of meaning. Some of our uses of the word are ambiguous: ‘a
good woman’, for example, might refer to anything from a virtuous wife to a
good-time girl, and ‘Good luck!” can be heartfelt and ironic, depending on your
tone of voice.”
The author says that in the context of his book, the “good life” means “life that is characterized by goodness,
a morally praiseworthy lsife, a life valuable in it impact on others, a life
devoted to the common good.”
He observes:
“Having spent most of my career listening to people in research
projects talking about their lives – their dreams, their passions, their joys
and their sorrows – it strikes me that though most of us know deep within
ourselves what constitutes a good life, we spend much of our time, barking up a
succession of wrong trees. Perhaps we are genuinely unsure of how to put our
convictions into practice.”
He cites the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have others do
unto you? It sounds like a the recipe for a good life, but how in practice do
you stifle your perfectly natural urges towards greed, ambition,
competitiveness or revenge, the very things likely to leach goodness out of
your life? How do
you shed grudges you actually enjoy carrying? How do you find the
emotional wherewithal to forgive someone who’s wronged you? How do you let go
of stuff you’ve done in the past?”
He says that in pursuit of the Good Life, we may be distracted by “glittering
baubles that offer variations on the themes of self-indulgence and
self-instructions – money, pleasure, status, possessions – that have the power
to seduce us. Or perhaps we’ve made a calculated decision to go for the good
time before embracing the good life, just in case we miss some of the fun. Saint
Augustine is supposed to have prayed this ruthlessly honest prayer: ‘Grant me
chastity and continence, but not yet.’
All seven chapters of the book are littered with fresh insights. I
cannot possibly summarize them all this column but I will extract some which
may be useful for us to understand how to lead the Good Life to supplement our
reflections based on the Scriptures during this season.
Mackay notes that many people in the West, whose lifestyle is getting
to be the standard for the rest of the world, it feels like the Golden Age has
arrived:
“Extraordinary advances in medical science; the explosion of
information and communication technology that stimulates, informs and entertains
us like never before; swift and cheap international travel; efficient,
reliable, affordable cars; promising talk of a clean-energy revolution; online
shopping; plentiful year-round fresh food supply that defies the four seasons;
ever-smarter manufacturing and distribution processes that whisk tulips from
Amsterdam to florists in Melbourne, and European fashion labels from their Chinese factories to warehouses
all over the world; to say nothing of the sophistication of modern marketing
techniques tha stroke our egos with seductive skill. If ever we were going to
be able to live the good life, surely this would be the time.”
For the rest of the world, … there is the “… teeming squalor of the
world’s refugee camps, the ravages of continuing wars (driven, as usual, by
religious rivalries or territorial greed, or both), the eternal tensions
between India and Pakistan, or the looming problem of global food security. In
fact, even in the West’s comfortable and relatively secure cities and suburbs,
our dreamy blue skies are sometimes clouded by the frightening possibility of
global warming wreaking ecological and geopolitical havoc on our planet. But in
the busy round of daily life, most of us manage to put such thoughts out of our
minds. We have a more appealing, more immediate agenda; the pursuit of
perfection …”
Such relentless pursuit of perfection, at the expense of social
consciousness, leads to what the author calls the Utopia complex: “We have enshrined towering self-esteem as a
cardinal virtue and the greatest gift we can pass on to the rising generation.
Utopians are conditioned (and are fully conditioning their children” to assume
that perfection in anything should be within their grasp.”
The author observes further: “The Utopian complex fills a vacuum where
political passion, religious faith or social idealism once inspired dreams of a
better world rather than a perfect life. Having fallen for the blandishments of
the consumer society, many of us have adopted materialism as our driving
philosophy, sometimes managing to remarry it with religious or political faith.
In the West, the capitalist model of materialism has captured our hearts and
minds, and mass marketing is its most obvious face.”
There is too much preoccupation with self “or the wish to lead a life
based on economic security and material comfort. As a species, we’ve been focused on these ever
since our forebears started storing food for the winter and lining their caves
with animal skins.
“Looking for our after our own interests is natural; it’s even
necessary, up to a point, for our physical and emotional survival. In a modern capitalist society pursuing the goal
of endless economic growth, the health of the economy depends on every consumer
being driven by self-interest. .. What’s changed is that the self we are
increasingly being encouraged to indulge is a buffed-up, idealized self that
doesn’t always correspond to the person we know ourselves to be, or to the life
we know we are really living. “
The book says that if we continue to market Brand Me, “we may find
that we have become the foolish victims of our own hype.” In promoting Brand Me, “particularly via our
status symbols and online bragging, it’s easy to forget that we may sacrificing
the very thing that will lead to the deepest sense of satisfaction: self
respect based on self-control. There is no shortcut to that, and no amount of
self-promotion will get us there”
More insights from the book, The Good Life, next column. For comments, email: npestelos@gmail.com
NMP/19 Feb 2016/5.56 p.m.
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