Flawed people still can accomplish much good

A while back, in this newspaper’s “Ask the Editors” column, a reader questioned the wisdom of allowing Paul Graves, a retired Methodist minister, to “evangelize freely” in The Spokesman-Review.

Editor Steve Smith’s response was that Graves represents a mainstream Christian point of view, balanced by Steve Massey, a conservative Christian. Smith then expressed his desire to find a “mainstream voice representing the ethics and values of agnostics, atheists and humanists.”

“Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” said I.

I’m an agnostic humanist, and I’m curious about, and read, nearly everything. Just scanning a representative shelf I see books on gardening, politics, psychology, mathematics, business, various sciences, several branches of philosophy, and one on baseball (never mind my lowbrow fiction collection).

Walker Percy’s “Lost in the Cosmos” is one of my all-time favorites. In it, he neatly skewers the notion that we can understand ourselves, let alone humanity as a whole.

Here’s one of his thought experiments:

A) You are extraordinarily generous, ecstatically loving of the right person, supremely knowledgeable about what is wrong with the country, about people, capable of moments of insight unsurpassed by any scientist or artist or writer in the country. You possess an infinite potentiality.

B) You are of all people in the world probably the most selfish, hateful, envious (e.g., you take pleasure in reading death notices in the newspaper and in hearing of an acquaintance’s heart attack), the most treacherous, the most frightened and, above all, the phoniest.

He then asks which statement most accurately describes you – A), B), neither, or both?

And, “If you checked ‘both’ – 60 percent of respondents did – how can that be?”

Well, put me in that majority. That is, I’m a hypocrite. We all are – which is just to say that most people are both black and white.

As far as I can tell, only two types of people are purely one color: saints and sociopaths. Fortunately, flawed people can still do a great deal of good, and being hypocritical needn’t stop you.

Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, for example, left legacies that stand above their weaknesses for the flesh.

The notion of “good” is, of course, one of the fundamental conundrums of our being. What good is, what it means to be good, and how to exist in the world as a good person are a curiously difficult nut to crack.

Aristotle said, “The study of truth is partly hard and partly easy. A proof of this is that no one man is able to grasp it adequately. Yet they do not all entirely fail.”

This is a pretty good axiom, I think, in line with his belief in a golden mean of behavior, between the vices of “excess” and “defect.” He sees courage, for instance, as the middle ground between the excess of foolhardiness and the defect of cowardice.

I’m chock-full of excesses and defects, opinionated and aggressive in expressing certain opinions, full of moral rectitude, certain that I know more than others, not suffering fools well, etc., etc. Fortunately, I’m also humorous and self-deprecating and at least occasionally aware of how full of it I am.

When I first mentioned to my wife that I’d like to write this column, she told me how I’d be up on my high horse, putting on airs I had no business wearing. In one of my better responses, I think, I told her I thought I could be on a “low horse.”

So just picture me on a Shetland pony rather than a thoroughbred. And, despite my very strong views on a variety of topics, I hope to be “fair and balanced,” in a non-Fox News manner.

I should also tell you that my lack of surety in God’s existence isn’t an attack on anyone’s religious beliefs. I’m fine with God and religion, as long as neither is used as a justification to kill people or do other nasty things – when I think they are, I’ll take issue – and I consider myself a spiritual person.

I think you’ll also find that my humanistic views are probably not that different from those of many who are devout in their belief in God and in the practice of their religion.

I look forward to the dialogue to follow, and I hope you’ll enjoy, even if provoked, the view that I see from my low vantage.