Lecture
16: Must one obey one’s parents under all
circumstances?
A certain young man who wished to
study philosophy, but was forbidden by his father to do so, put this question
to him "Tell me, Musonius, must one obey one's parents in all things, or
are there some circumstances under which one need not heed them?"
And Musonius replied, "That
everyone should obey his mother and father seems a good thing, and I certainly
recommend it. However, let us see what this matter of obedience is, or rather,
first, what is the nature of disobedience, and let us consider who the disobedient
person is, if in this way we may better understand what the nature of obedience
is.”
The customs of the ages will come and go, but back
when I was a child, in those glorious yet cringeworthy 1970’s, there still
seemed to be a general consensus that if your parents told you to do something,
you would have the good sense to go ahead and do it.
Maybe it was just from a fear of the painful consequences,
and maybe we sometimes cheated a bit when they weren’t looking, but we knew not
to mess too much with Mom and Dad.
Before you think I am waxing nostalgic, I remind
you that I am hardly a fan of any blind obedience to authority. I once got
myself into hot water when a friend’s mother scolded me for doing something foolish,
and she then asked me the usual question from back then: “If all your friends
jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?”
I was sadly always a smartass. “I don’t really
know. Would it be different if you told
me to do it?” There was the point when the one mom called the other mom, and
the dads dealt out the appropriate punishments. Ah, good times!
I don’t mean to be flippant, yet I can’t help but
struggle, decades later, with many of the same problems. Somehow, they put people
“in charge”, for whatever reason or by whatever means, and they give them power
over others in whatever way, and there is still this thoughtless assumption
that we must all obey them without question.
I do commit myself to a respect for my betters, and
I do dedicate myself to an obedience to what is right and good. Working that
out is not always easy. How am I to distinguish between the person and the
principle, between loyalty and truth?
After many years as a Yankee, I eventually found
myself in Dixie. I did not know the customs, but a fellow of the old school set
me straight about one important point.
“I notice people often address one another as sir or
ma’am. Is there a rule for that?”
“Yes, sir, there is. You speak to anyone older,
wiser, or better than you as sir or ma’am. Do not let anyone tell you
otherwise. You can never be a Southern gentleman without those rules.”
“By those standards, I would probably have to refer
to most anyone as sir or ma’am, barring children or criminals.”
“Well done, sir, you’re learning!”
The world has been changing, of course, and those
rules are no longer socially required in the South. I will go out on a limb,
however, and suggest that they are still morally required everywhere.
So many of us have lost a sense of respect and
decency. That is a crying shame.
Now does this mean I must follow any commands from
those supposedly older, wiser, or better?
How does that relate to the dictates of my own conscience?
Is it acceptable for me to merely follow all orders?
They execute people for doing that.
Is it better for me to follow my own sense of right
and wrong? The execute people for doing that too.
When asked where his loyalties lay, Robert E. Lee
spoke both with both firmness and with subtlety:
I
shall never bear arms against the Union, but it may be necessary for me to
carry a musket in the defense of my native state, Virginia, in which case I
shall not prove recreant to my duty.
There is an intersection of the duty to my
superiors and the duty to myself; it is a complementarity, and not a contradiction.
Written in 3/2000
No comments:
Post a Comment