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Turtle Talk #3

Let us begin by saying that although what many ancient people called,  "the good, and the true, and the beautiful", may not be a perfect description of fundamental human interests, they are a wonderful way to think about what lures us.  I think that, of all places I most desire, that place where truth and beauty and goodness come together--where each is uncompromised by the full presence of the others--is most satisfying.  That is to say, for instance, that what we find beautiful does not require compromising what we know to be true; that what we find to be true is not in tension with what we believe is good; that what entrances us with its sheer goodness shines with beauty.

It is a kind of harmony.

I do not hear music when I walk in the woods--I hear chirping and leaves brushing each other--nor, when I hear a woman laugh or a child giggle, do I slip off into an episode of truth-seeking, and I do not sit under chrome-plated pyramid contraptions and wonder whether my navel is right- or left-handed, but I do want a life where nothing I discover to be true has to be denied because of what I believe to be good, nor where something that seems beautiful that it has to be denied because I know something that is true.

I have read fascinating articles that have tried to prioritize those huge human interests, that might argue, for example, that first we are attracted to beauty, and that what we call good is subsidiary to beauty but, for now at least, I am content to leave those explorations to others.  What does attract me are the confluences; where and when and how what I know to be true, and find to be good, and discover to be beautiful come together, without compromise.  And when they do not, where the tension lies.  Have I committed myself to an ethic, or a philosophy, or an interpretation of fact, or a shower of delight that needs to be rethought?  Something is out-of-joint!  That is to say, it offends us, something important to us, to abandon what is good, or what seems so plainly true, or is undeniably beautiful:  it happens, but it is not satisfying.  It bothers us.  It is not enough to speak of "doing the lesser evil", as theologians sometimes do.  What we want is to be true, to be good, and beautiful.  That is a lot to expect, but it is not too much.

Consider the position many religious people are in today.  They have been taught a whole system of ethics (or a system of thinking about what is good), all the while living in a world where they have do deny things that are plainly true:  that the universe is fantastically old, that life has slowly and gradually come to be (perhaps almost everywhere), and that things that live for a while actually die.  The universe does not show any evidence of having a designer or creator:  it does everything by itself.  There is no list anywhere in the universe of the best things to do.  Even if we human beings mess up everything, and manage to destroy every last living thing on this planet, the Milky Way will not care.  The Milky Way--our galaxy--has its own black hole.  It seems more likely that such events are common.  But the last two human beings, observing the shambles, will care.

They will wish it were not true, and call it ugly, and only ruefully call it a good thing.

We are the place where the good and the true and the beautiful come together; or at least one of the places.  Or where it might happen.  So we ought to pay attention to how it can be achieved.

I am no longer religious.  In the western European religious tradition into which I was born and bred, it was, and still is, insisted that truth and beauty and goodness all come to focus in a god; one or another, or some assortment of them.  That is nothing more or less than what we once thought to be true:  gods up there, us here, evil beings somewhere nether.  But that is nothing more nor less than an earlier worldview: how people sometimes thought before they began to think scientifically.  Goodness does not come numbered on tablets of stone.  Harp music coming from the clouds, and cobblestones of gold and rubies do not really entrance me.  I shall be happy never to hear anyone bellow, "How Great Thou Art", again.  I prefer Willy Nelson, or Sergei Rachmaninoff; George Gershwin.

I go to such places as have angels and gods and pipe organs only to celebrate someone's wedding, or to be there when a friend has died.  I have finally come to be able, sometimes, even to sing a stanza of a friend's favorite hymn, even when every word of it is absurd;  even I believe to be true about the world is denied.  It is hard to go back to such places.




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