Appreciation of Life
Every human being comes out of the womb into relationships: with one’s mother, father, and maybe even other caretakers. The issue that emerges later in life, the real thrust of the internal war between good and evil, is the question of how to respect the differences of others and how to care for them properly, and also how to avoid using or exploiting them. Ethical Culture believes that is the primary moral conundrum of life – this is your world, you can either use it for your own ends or actually know it and love it in itself. Loving life in general is great, a positive attitude and enjoying the beauty of it all is passable good living, but as I have already said, the idea of life in general is a mere abstraction. What is real is living people, things, events, etc. Usually when people say they love life they mean they love their lives. Human beings are good at creating their own virtual realities. If you actually love life, you must appreciate the differences of others, which means undertaking the difficult work of getting to know the individuals you encounter and trying to understand their characters, not just appreciating the comforts that life can offer. To love what appeals to you, speaks to you, is personal expression; to accept that we are intertwined with all of life is to begin to go beyond ourselves and into the realm of real life and real human relations.
So what does love mean? Religions often say, “love your neighbor” but too many neighbors are nasty unlovable people. So when traditional religions advise you to love your neighbor, obviously they are not talking about warm affection or romantic love, but even when we speak of brotherly love, or love for our fellow men and women, there is a common element – appreciation, connection, concern, caring, and respect for unique aspects of the other. Ultimately loving one’s neighbors means concern for the them, caring enough to want the best for them.
Usually religious love is loving the other as oneself. Felix Adler claims you should love people for themselves. Adler taught that the path to satisfaction and to happiness is acceptance of difference instead of trying to make everything into yourself. Find happiness in working with life, not trying to control it for your own interest. Loving life in all its individual uniqueness sounds noble and a bit dreamy. In personal living and in community it may not be so easy.
Personal Living
Human nature is plastic and has evolved through millennia of cultural shaping. Each of us becomes a person in that cultural relationship and our culture seems to specialize in creating a neurotic population. For 10,000 years human beings have been living in cultures that place authority above the individual – with God, the ruler, the father, supposed natural law, and the cultural power system being prime examples. In this understanding, what matters is how well each person fits in the (static) accepted system, and relationships become contests of different versions of normative values.
Ethical Culture turns the traditional authority dynamic upside down. Every person has an equal share of authority in our human world and that fact makes being right and good more difficult. Right depends on the needs of many and good is not a sure thing but a quality we bring to our relationships. We have to figure out how to act depending on what we find in the relationship. We can either manipulate and use others for our satisfaction or find satisfaction in loving the actual living presence in front of us. The opposite of love is indifference; loving means involvement in the lives of others.
Of course this is our theory; actual living and loving are more complicated. Loving an unfaithful partner or a natural world that inflicts disease and tragedy on us is difficult, but knowing that each and every cheating husband and mosquitoes is for some reason doing what they need to do provides a perspective that can break through self-absorption. Reality isn’t perfect and perfection does not need love, we do. Love is a quality that brings out the best in others and ourselves.
We can work at being happy or we can find happiness in working with life. We can appreciate what is and work to make it better or continually run from what is toward an assumed better. From childhood we should be encouraged to feel our central place in life, feel our place in others’ lives, feel their place in our lives, understanding how we determine what is possible for ourselves and for those around us.
The workshops we offer such as Straight Talk, Non-Violent Communication, and others help get across the idea, but how we treat each other within Societies is the best lesson. Then, accepting the relational nature of life, we are confronted with explaining social problems, social and economic injustice within the relational system.