Skip to main content

Sometimes the good goes from left to right; sometimes from right to left.

I think his name was Lukas.  It was almost fifty years ago.

 He is the only genuinely ambidextrous person I have known.  He was neither left-handed, nor right-handed.  He was both.  Maybe neither.  

 I watched him take notes in a meeting.  Sometimes he wrote with his right hand, from left-to-right on the paper.  Sometimes he wrote left-handed, from right to left, tilting the notepad the other way.  His secretary told me she had to learn to read script both ways, sometimes on alternate lines.  

 Our newest grandson, whose name is Jao, is just a bit over a year old.  We have wondered whether he will be left- or right-handed.  We have not wondered, as seriously, whether he will be ambidextrous, because we assume he will be left or right.

 Is it plant or animal?  Is it male or female?  Was that a hit or a miss?  Is that particle here or there?  Is that idea right or wrong?  

 I used to belong to a church that defined itself theologically; by its formal beliefs.  Some churches define themselves by their ancestry; some by their behavior; some by this or that practice; some by what they won't eat, or how the men tend their beards, or their hair.  We were theological, so we tended to how we stated what we believed.  It made us uneasy to say it so baldly, but we thought we would get to heaven because of what we believed, far more than by how we behaved.  

 We seem to have a tendency to either/or-ness.  Abortion is wrong.  Life is good.  Death is bad.  Or is it good, sometimes?  Eating meat is good.  Eating meat is awful.  Catholics are going to heaven, and Muslims are going to Saudi Arabia.  Or are the Catholics going to Saudi Arabia?  Wouldn't that be hell?  Nuclear power is bad.  Burning coal is bad.  Is burning wood in town bad, too?  

 Lukas was not right-handed.  Lukas was not left-handed.  He was both-handed.  It worked precisely as well, either way.  Some of us are very close to neither-handed:  it does not work very well either way.  If you have ever played baseball, you will know what that means.  I spent some time, once, trying to take off from my right foot and shooting a basketball with my left hand.  I am definitely right-handed, except with a shovel:  I am not sure which is which.  

 Most ethical issues are not simply right or wrong.  The people who wrote most of our texts on ethics were not ambidextrous.  They were right, or wrong.  You shall not kill (except maybe in a war, or while protecting your kids).  You shall not steal (except maybe if you are being starved to death).  You shall not lie (unless telling the truth would be worse).  You shall not, you shall not, you shall not.  Unless.  Unless.  Unless.  Unless.  

 To be moral, one has to stop thinking that everyone is either right-handed, or left-handed.  One has to be nuanced to be moral.  There are no simple absolutes one can chisel into stone, unless it is the non-specific encouragement to be good, or kind; that kind of abstract thing.  And then the hard work begins:  what exactly should we do?  

   


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more