For The Bohol Tribune 5
In This Our Journey
NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS
For this week’s column, we again
present the thoughts of noted Australian author and newspaper columnist, Hugh
Mackay, contained in his book, “The Good Life,” one of the 14 books he has
written in the field of social psychology and ethics .
The book was a gift from a close
friend and high school classmate, Sydney-based Milwida Sevilla-Reyes, one of
the many she has given me over the past 58 years since our graduation from the
old Quezon High in Lucena City. For the past several weeks, I have been
recycling my gratitude to her by sharing Mackay’s precious insights to
complement Scripture-based lessons in the spirit of the Lenten season.
Now we deal with Chapter 5 of
Mackay’s book which is mostly about the Golden Rule, something every fourth
grader the world over must have memorized as prescribed basis for moral conduct:
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Without the archaic
language, the author translates it as “ treat
other people the way you would like to be treated.”
He notes: “Some people find the
principle easier to grasp if it is turned around to emphasize the negative –don’t
treat people in a way you would not like to be treated – as variation sometimes
referred to as the Silver Rule.”
We can offer our versions but
there’s plenty of guidance about the rule “from virtually every religious and
ethical tradition in human history.” He notes:
“Versions of the Golden Rule
appear in ancient Egypt, ancient China and ancient Greece, and in religious
traditions ranging from Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism to
the three Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – and newer
religions such as Baha’i. You’ll also
encounter it in non-theistic religions like Buddhism, in Scientology and every
form of humanism.”
No one, it seems, authored the
Golden Rule: “This is not a principle that needs a god to ordain it or a
religion to enshrine it: it is absolutely integral to any systematic attempt to
work out how humans might best live together in peace and harmony.”
Mackay further notes:
“Six centuries before the
Christian era, the ancient Greek philosopher Pittacus put it like this: ‘Do not
to your neighbor what you would take ill from him’. Socrates, quoted in Plato’s Crito, went one step further: ‘One should never mistreat any man,
no matter how one has been mistreated by him.’
Mackay quotes Confucius who says: “Never
impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.” In the Hindu
tradition, he says, the same idea is found in The Mahabharata, Book 13: ‘One should never do that to another
which one regards as injurious to one’s own self.’
The author adds: ‘This is, in
brief, the rule of dharma. All other behavior is due to selfish desires’. For
Christians, they are familiar with what is stated in the Old Testament book of
Leviticus as ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’
something echoed several times in the New Testament, explicitly in the
gospels of Matthew and Luke. The same
rule is often cited in modern attempts to define universal human rights.
In reality, the Golden Rule
competes with the unwritten Law of Reciprocity which is so powerful in human
affairs and quite hard to resist: “You
scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. You listen to me and only then will I
listen to you. You treat me badly and I’ll treat you badly. You damage my
reputation and I’ll damage yours.”
Indeed the spirit of revenge is so
seductive that it prevents the application of the Golden Rule in many
instances. Mackay says that the old Jewish saying of ‘an eye for an eye and a
tooth for a tooth’ has been interpreted to justify revenge “but in fact it was
originally intended to convey an altogether different idea: that any punishment
should precisely fit the crime – an eye, and no more than an eye, for an eye.
It was a warning against over-reaction.”
To resist the urge for revenge is
the acid test of our commitment to the Golden Rule. “Revenge is the ultimate
perversion of the rule; it amounts to saying, I will treat you the way you’ve treated me – the opposite of
treating you in the way I myself would like to be treated.”
Revenge brings us to the level of
those who have wronged us by responding to bad behavior with bad behavior. “Faced
with the challenge of forgiveness, negotiation, approachment or reconciliation, we reject all those
possibilities in favor of the rawest and most simple-minded reaction. Revenge
challenges the very idea of virtue.”
The author further observes that
some people do not want to live by the Golden Rule because it means giving up
the competitive urge, “their ambition or perhaps their sense of personal
freedom and independence.” The Golden Rule requires a highly cooperative
approach, “which works best when we think of ourselves primarily as individuals
with independent identities” competing with each other.
The Golden Rule works best for
what he calls “communitarians, humanitarians, egalitarians and peacemakers” and
will be quite a challenge to those “seduced by the Western fashion for rampant,
self-indulgent individualism.”
Those who think people are
competitive in nature and that human story is all about winners and losers will
have “trouble paying more than lip service” to the Golden Rule.
Here is the application of the
Golden Rule in international relations:
“If national leaders lived by the
Golden Rule, no nation would invade another. There would certainly have been an
unprovoked invasion of Poland in 1939 by Germany or of Iraq in 2003 by the so-called
coalition of the willing … Such unprovoked invasions represent a breach of the
Golden Rule so flagrant, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could keep a straight
face while claiming moral justifications for them…
“Knowing what war does to the
innocent civilian populations on both sides of the conflict, to a nation’s
infrastructure and to the fomentation of hate, leaders committed to the Golden
Rule would harness the power of diplomacy and negotiation and, when diplomatic
solutions proved elusive, would accept mediation from the United Nations ..”
Politicians must follow the Golden
Rule:
“In a Golden Rule world,
politicians would treat their political opponents as they themselves would wish
to be treated. Political debates would be marked by a spirit of courtesy based
on a proper recognition of each other’s legitimacy as elected members of
parliament and respect for each other’s convictions, as well as a respectful
appreciation of each other’s human frailties and vulnerabilities. Politicians
would take their opponents seriously, not as armies might take their enemies
seriously, but as we all wish to be taken seriously in our day-to-day dealings with
each other.”
How about business leaders?
“Business leaders trying to live
by the Golden Rule would rate respect for their customers, employees and
suppliers as highly as their respect for family and friends. They would aim to
treat all those people as they themselves wish to be treated. In a Golden
Rule-driven marketplace, commitment to telling the truth and transparency would
be the hallmark of all transactions
How about journalists and mass media
people?
If they follow the Golden Rule, they
would “feel obliged to make only
truthful assertions and would carefully distinguish between the facts as they
understood them and their opinions about the facts.”
Athletes? If they follow the
Golden Rule, it would end cheating in sports.
As individuals, if we follow the Golden Rule, we would not do anything
to exploit, deceive or manipulate others or cut moral concerns that could
disadvantage others commercially, professionally,
politically or personally.
The author points out that a recurring problem with the Golden Rule is
that “ it seems too easy to think of exceptions or ways in which it could be
misapplied.” He cites this example: “What,
for example, we say about workplace bullies, control freaks or narcissists who,
in various ways, make life miserable for the people who work with them? Should
we continue to be nice to them regardless, as the Golden Rule seems to imply?”
In the case of bad behavior, he says, “we should treat others as
others would expect us to be treated if we had behaved badly as they have.” He suggests a qualification to the Golden
Rule: treat others the way you would like them to treat you, “provided that is
just fair, and reasonable.”
His comment: “It doesn’t have quite the same ring as ‘do not do unto
others’, and it leaves open all sorts of questions about the interpretation of ‘just,
fair, and reasonable.’ But it does remind us that moral dilemmas are
not always simple and straightforward, and that the context needs to be taken
into account.”
Such dilemmas should not discourage us to apply the Golden Rule “as
our guide in trying to work out what’s the best thing to do every situation,
assuming we want to introduce a little more goodness into our lives. Its implementation would transform the life
of any community, whether a family, a neighborhood, a workplace, a school, a
university or a parliament, fostering cooperation, willingness to
compromise, an unyielding attitude of respect for others and concern for their
well-being.”
As a guiding principle, the Golden Rule beats revenge, unbridled self-interest
and destructive competition. Although there are constraints to living by the
Golden Rule, he says: “Deep in our psyche, perhaps in our DNA, is the conviction
that there is no other way to live if the species is to thrive.”
Such hope and redemption is what Lent is all about for us Christians
and other faiths as well. #
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