Slave, here is no father for you to kill. You ask what you have done, you have committed the one error which was possible in this field.
Your answer is the very one I made myself to Rufus when he rebuked me because I could not find the one missing step in a syllogism. “Well,” said I, “I suppose I have not burnt the Capitol down”; and he answered, “Slave, the missing step here is the Capitol.”
You are not going to tell me, are you, that setting fire to the Capitol and killing one's father are the only forms of wrongdoing?
To deal with one's impressions without thought or method, to fail to follow argument or demonstration or sophism, in a word, to be unable to see what concerns himself and what does not in question and answer—is there no wrongdoing, I ask, in any of these?
“What I’m doing isn’t so bad! It could be so much worse! It’s not like I’ve killed anyone!”
I believe they call this the informal fallacy of relative privation, a variation on the old red herring, but it doesn’t take a fancy name to know when someone is distracting you from one problem by pointing out another.
I can relate to this error, because I will become frustrated with the fact that I have neglected something important, and I find that I have no way of making an excuse. Clutching at straws, I then insist that there must be something far more important to worry about.
Apples and oranges, as they say. If I am struggling with being a bad husband, the fault isn’t diminished if I say that my neighbor is being an even worse father.
Poor thinking is poor thinking, as simple as that, and whatever the degree, it hinders our ability to distinguish the true from the false and the right from the wrong. It might be a different vice than theft or murder, but it is still a vice; to abuse my neighbor violates justice, while to abuse my own mind violates prudence. In both cases, somebody gets hurt.
“Yes, but what goes on in my head still doesn’t matter as much.”
As distinct as they might be, our interior deliberations and our exterior actions are hardly unrelated, since our thoughts are the very cause of our deeds. Whatever may happen to me, or whatever passions I may feel, it is my power of judgment that makes the final call; yes, it does so just as much when I surrender my judgment, which is itself a decision.
All those things that we say are wrong turn out to be wrong because we made bad choices, and we made bad choices because we weren’t thinking straight. No book learning is required to grasp this principle of common sense.
Some might suggest that love is really the most important part of life, and that the power to give of ourselves without condition is the only thing that can complete us. They would be quite correct in one sense, in that love is the perfection of the will, and yet even the act of loving is incomplete for us without first knowing what we should love, how we should love, and why we should love.
It is understanding that makes love possible. John and Paul were right to say, “All you need is love.” John Paul II was also right to add, “There can be no love without the truth.”
Whatever way I look at it, my willingness and ability to reason soundly turns out to be a bigger deal than I realized, for the meaning and value of my life depend upon it. A little exercise in demonstration might make the difference between leading my soul to safety or being at the mercy of sophists.
Written in 10/2000
No comments:
Post a Comment