FRED WRITES:

I really appreciate your work at The Thinking Housewife. It has made a difference in my life. As a life-long liberal I have had the gravest doubts about things, and I find that you have opened new doors of thought for me. It may have been that I was wrong about many things.

Wrong, but I don’t feel guilty and I don’t count it as a sin, to be wrong about things and to make great efforts in service of those wrongs.

I do distinguish myself from most liberals in that I have little of this preposterous phony guilt, this phony concern, and this talk of compassion.

I’ll give you an example. Our farm workers are poorly paid and badly treated. And sure, I marched with Caesar Chavez and boycotted grapes in the 1960s, but I did more than that. I went out and did some farm work myself. For several years, I did common stoop labor in the cold, muddy fields of the Pacific Northwest. I found out what it was really like to do that kind of hard work. And yes, the farm workers are poorly paid and not often treated as well as they should be, but on a good day, working for a good farmer, it isn’t a bad way to make a living. So nowadays, when I see some workers out in the fields near where I live, I feel a true and genuine concern for their lives, because I actually know what it’s like.

Maybe what you mean by being traditional is to make that extra effort to get at the core and the truth of things, and not settle for the easiest and most superficial judgment.

Laura writes:

Thank you for writing. Yes, the aim is to get at reality, to know what it is.

In ethical matters, that is not so simple. We can only bring so much precision to these matters. As Aristotle said, we have to accept the limitations of generalization without dispensing with generalization.  We are, most of us, moral philosophers to some degree. Those who are not live moment to moment, as if  crawling through the darkness. Reason and intuition are our lights. Ethics is a practical science. We ponder these issues so that we can act virtuously, so that we can be good men and women. “[T]he first principle and cause of what is good is precious and divine,” Aristotle said (The Nicomachean Ethics). But in order to be good we have to understand human nature and our innate tendencies. That is the reality, the earthy core of things that you mention.

 The good of the community is always at issue when we consider the good of the individual. That is a first principle. Aristotle wrote:

For even if the good of the community coincides with that of the individual, it is clearly a greater and more perfect thing to acheive and preserve that of a community; for while it is desirable to secure what is good in the case of an individual, to do so in the case of a people or a state is something finer and more sublime.

In the Christian view, the good of the individual always coincides with the good of the community. Man is imperfectible. The individual finds his purpose in a flourishing whole, but he cannot avoid suffering or sacrifice. And, in the end, he is motivated not by this hope of communal flourishing but by an everlasting good.

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