To read today’s post in its optimal format, please go to the Just A Thought website. Please click here.
“Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.” – George Packer
Without principles, whatever moral governor one might have stops working, and with it — one’s ability to distinguish truth from fiction.
As George Orwell reminds us:
“We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Yikes!
It has been my experience that every time I’ve allowed my ambitions to dictate my principles I’ve lost my way — and finding my way back has never been easy.
“Don’t lose your grip upon your conscience. God put it in your breast to act as sentinel over your weaknesses.” ~ Minna Thomas Antrim
Principles need to be worn like hiking boots, not costume jewelry.
Otherwise, they are simply hollow words.
They aren’t casual alignments we make with popular opinions, but are the sweat equity we pay with what we truly believe.
Some principles are of a collective nature, like wearing a mask in public when one is sick.
- I protect you when I’m sick
- You protect me when you’re sick
How do we learn to develop principles and actually live them? I think we all need mentors.
One of my mentors was Marsha’s father, Charles Hahn.
When I first met Charles I was a young man who demanded much from life. I saw myself as having special rules that I thought could (should) be bent to accommodate me.
Charles was someone quite different from me:
- He was grounded ~ I was not
- He was humble ~ I was not
- He knew himself ~ I did not
Charles was a principled man — the kind of man I could only hope to be.
An account from one of his seminary professors:
It was at the end of his second year when I saw from my window Charles loading his car preparing to leave for summer break.
I knew he had not yet submitted his final paper for the year so I ran out to catch up with him before he left.
I reminded him this writing assignment was a course requirement.
I commended him on his excellent record and asked if he needed some accommodation.
Charles said he urgently needed to return home and wanted no special accommodation.
He said he understood the paper was a course requirement and was prepared to retake the class in the fall.
He then shook the professor’s hand and off he went.
It was a principle of Charles’s to not ask life to accommodate him. Assuming responsibility for his decisions was never up for debate, no matter how severe the consequences.
For Charles, life was about living according to one’s principles.
Such was his motivation when he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma.
We need principled men and women like Charles. We always have and always will, but the stakes are pretty high right now.
Just a thought…
Pat