Rules for Life

You’ve already heard two of my Rules for Life. As a reminder, Rule #2 is that everybody gets to whine sometimes—with the corollary that no one gets to whine all the time. Rule # 3 is that everybody gets to make mistakes, with the corollary that you might as well learn to be gentle with yourself and everyone else about it.

As you can see, they’re only half-serious rules. Rigid moral structures seem to work for some people—especially people who have a tendency to slide into various kinds of addictions. And when I was a teenager, I leaned in the direction of strong scruples. I took seriously John’s report of Jesus’ words “Be ye perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” This impulse towards perfectionism had its origins in being a very sick child dependent on a loving but impatient mother. It will not surprise you to learn that it made me vastly self-critical and unhappy. Or to hear that it took years of therapy to shoot enough arrows in that terrible giant to bring it to its knees.

I’m still a natural rule-follower (otherwise known as a “goody-two-shoes”). Old habits die hard—especially mental ones—so I still expect the heavens to thunder and a bolt of lightning to strike me if I walk the wrong way down the aisle at the grocery store. And on an intellectual level, societies seem to work only if people cooperate on following some basic rules: We should drive on the right side of the road, tell the truth in important matters, pay our fair share of taxes, not shoot people, and be civil in public places—at least most of the time.

On the other hand, I don’t think life in general can or should be relentlessly rule-bound—whether those rules are set by our government, by our religion, or (perhaps worst) by our society’s expectations. Human beings turn out to be strange and various. We are often born with temperaments ill-suited to the conditions in which we live our lives. We are shaped—often crippled—by the societies and families we grow up in. Sometimes we are blind to our own failings; sometimes we lack the ability to follow through on what we believe to be right. Passions carry us off in strange directions, some of them foolish. We are obstinately, ridiculously ourselves, even if it costs us our livelihoods or even our lives. So I’m no longer rah-rah for rules.

And yet.

Years ago, I was asked to give the speech at my school’s graduation. The ceremony took hours, many people spoke, and the most important speeches were by the graduates themselves. Nonetheless, I felt it incumbent on me to say one or two things I believed about living a good life. (Those things also needed to be appropriate and maybe even helpful.)

It had been a long, long time since I’d formally articulated any moral position. I ran my mind over the Kantians, with their moral absolutes (been there, done that); the Stoics, with their emphasis on dignity and autonomy (a little macho for me); the Platonists, with their emphasis on striving for the eternal ideal (attractive, but I already knew the downsides); and the Aristotelians, with their emphasis on moral strengths that can be cultivated (yes!) and as a mean between two flawed extremes (maybe).

What appealed most to me, in the end, was Socrates’ description of his daimon, his internal spirit. It didn’t tell him anything positive. It didn’t give him generalizable rules. It simply said no. No, this action at this moment is not okay.

For the purposes of my talk, I formulated it this way.

            NANCY’S NUMBER ONE RULE OF LIFE: Don’t be an asshole.

            (It can be rephrased in this way: Don’t be a total asshole.)

It’s a low bar, morally speaking.

I strive to do better than that most of the time. I expect my friends and family to do the same. But maybe the function of rules—rather than guidelines or aspirations—should not be to construct an ideal that rises to dizzying heights above us but to build a solid floor (with no trapdoors) beneath us.

What about you, dear readers? How are you thinking about moral rules and guidelines these days?