Guess what! I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a very old man. And lately I’ve been feeling my age.

I read that the Czech novelist, Franz Kafka, wrote that the meaning of life is that it ends. Well, as I near that end, I’ve been looking back at the various periods of my life. The period of my grade school years, is one I wish I had the power of memory and of words to describe to you. It was a time you can’t imagine, it was so primitive compared with the world of the late 20th and the 21st centuries.

I entered the first grade in 1920. The school was in an ancient two-story brick building. The principal’s office was off a landing half way to the second floor. It was a terrifying place with a frightening smell of iodine, or linament, or something that signaled it was a place for scrapes and cuts, of stuff that burned, and bandages by that formidable old maid.

Read the rest of Fate and Finis at the HUU Community Cafe. The talk was given at the HUU Fellowship on December 7, 2008

January 7, 1990

By James J. Geary

Wade asked me to talk, for not more than seven minutes, on my view of life after death. To do it justice I think I would need to go into my whole philosophy of being, and there is not time for that. But I’ll make a stab at it anyway.

I was given for Christmas this diary of H. L. Mencken, the so-called sage of Baltimore. I quote from the introduction by the editor:

“He had not a vestige of belief in an afterlife, but wrote, catalogued, and left behind him an enormous quantity of records so that those who came after him in this life would have an accurate picture of him.”

Now to me those records are Mencken’s afterlife, or rather a small part of it. Everything he wrote in life, everything he did, that had an influence on others, an influence on a fly or a rock, was part of his afterlife. That influence goes on and on, like ripples from a stone dropped in a pond. It becomes a part of the universe, as of course was Mencken himself; and, of course, as are you and I.

Each of us is a part of the universe. (I don’t like that word “part.” Maybe “portion,” or “fragment,” or even “aspect” would be better.) Each of us is a portion or an aspect of the universe, just as is a mountain, or a sea, or, and this is a better comparison, a cloud. It is quite apparent to us that a cloud continually changes, from moment to moment, just as we do, just as a mountain does. Yet the cloud, and we, and the mountain, are portions of the Universe.

Our every act, our every thought, is a fragment, or an aspect, of the continuing and infinite experience of the universe. I think that is our afterlife.

A Zen master named Shunryu Suzuki, who moved from Japan to California, looked at the 1300-foot waterfall in Yosemite National Park. The water seemed to fall slowly because of the height, and it separated into a curtain of small streams and individual drops. He wrote, in part, as follows:

“And I thought it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain. It takes time, you know, a long time, for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall. And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life. But at the same time, I thought, the water was not originally separated, but was one whole river. Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling. It is as if the water does not have any feeling when it is one whole river. Only when separated into many drops can it begin to have or to express some feeling. . .

“Before we were born we had no feeling; we were one with the universe. . . After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life.”

I think that approaches how I feel about life, and about life after death. We were not individuals before we were born, although we were there, in a few billion ancestors. And I don’t think we will be individuals after we die. But we’ll be there, everything that we have been will be there as part of the continuing experience of the universe.

I think I have come to terms with death. I believe I have no fear of death.

Have you ever wondered what you would think about if you were at 30,000 feet in a plane that was hopelessly crippled and diving to certain destruction.

I have often thought that in a situation such as that I would face death calmly. I would be thankful that I had been a conscious part — for a little while — of this great, mysterious universe. I would feel that I as an individual would be no more, but that my life and everything that I had been or done would go on forever as a continuing influence in the universe, just as a dying star is forever a continuing influence in the universe. I would rejoin the great river — the great river that is the universe and which, of course, I have really never left.

Commentary

I made the mistake of trying to give this talk without notes. I would, I believe, have been much more effective if I had read it well and forcefully, I should have known this type of talk does not lend itself – at least for me – to delivery without the manuscript in front of me.

I don’t like the word “part” because I don’t believe in parts when speaking philosophically about being. I don’t believe, in an ultimate sense, that there are individuals. With Heraclitus I feel that the universe is all one, and in constant flux. Of course in our everyday existence we have to act as though the world is made up of individuals because we cannot but view ourselves as individuals- In the same manner, for practical purposes of the marketplace, or for putting a man on the moon, we need to employ mathematics. But mathematics, I believe, has failed to have any appreciaable influence in solving the mysteries of creation and being. It enables us to measure the speed of light and speculate on the distance to far-out galaxies, and even to theorize about a “big bang” and black holes, but in the end all the mysteries remain – what was there before the “big bang,” what is the answer to the many infinities, is there a beginning, is there an end. The reason mathematics has failed, I believe, is that it is an arbitrary tool devised by man to try to measure things; and in an ultimate philosophical sense the world is not measurable? it is not measurable because it is not made up of individuals.

Suzuki’s analogy, like most analogies, is imperfect. It is hard for us to equate a living thing, especially a human being, with an inanimate something like a drop of water. We don’t think of a drop of water as having feeling; although I think it can be argued that feeling is a matter of degree for everything that we view as an individual thing. What I was trying to say, I think, is that we should glory in being alive and having feeling and being conscious for however brief a time; that we should accept that this “gift” is not permanent; that we must always accept the bad with the good; that in the end everything is in balance.

And that brings up another equally important aspect of my philosophy that this paper does not touch on. As you know, I believe in an ultimate justice, a law of compensation, so that pain and pleasure, joy and sadness, hope and despair, are balanced for living things. Thus my sister, who died when she was two, not only missed out on the joys of growing up and of adulthood, but also the pains, the self-doubts, the despair.

Good morning again, survivors! And congratulations!

We are all survivors, are we not?

(Story – not sure what was read)

So he didn’t survive. But we have — at least so far. Survival and security is the topic of this talk ; but it is also about ancestors, and children, and the celebration of life.

First I would like for us to take a look at some remarkable aspects of survival. Not only have we survived, but our parents had to survive, at least until we came along, or we wouldn’t be here would we.

And our grandparents were survivors, and their parents and grand-parents — at least to the reproductive age.

So I guess we are made of the right stuff; and they were made of the right stuff. And then, too, just maybe they were pretty darn lucky. Luck is a big thing in this world.

But you know what , it was not just our immediate ancestors who have survived to the reproductive age. It’s our ancestors for the past…thousand years? million years? no, it’s our ancestors for the past billion years or so!

And there has not been a single break in that almost endless chain — or rather I should say in those almost endless chains, because for each of us there have been thousands, millions of ancestral chains — not a single break in any one of them for a thousand million years, and more.

If just one of the vast number of ancestral lines that each of us has, had a break, we would not be who we are. We’d be somebody else.

I don’t know about you, but that just boggles my mind — to coin a phrase. I have a hard time taking that in: not a single break for billions of generations, even back to our ancestors who were little wiggly things in the sea; and even before that.

So, for us and for our billions of ancestors, it has been a pretty benign world — a pretty benign world.

But is it a benign world?

Let us consider for a minute the number of living things that have perished before reaching the reproductive age. Think of the hundreds, maybe thousands of seeds that die for each one that takes root; or the many that take root but are crowded out before they can reproduce seeds of their own. Consider the great number of fish eggs that are gobbled up, or the baby fish that are eaten for every fish that reaches adulthood.

Or to bring it closer home, think of the agonizing number of children that our more recent ancestors lost. My maternal great grandparents lost three our of ten. My paternal grandmother lost six out of eleven.

So it appears to be a very dangerous world, and we who have survived must indeed be made of the right stuff; and we and our ancestors must have been unbelievably lucky to have come so far.

Very interesting. But what is my point?

Well, it seems to me, that in view of that long record of survival, we are sort of obligated to do the best we can to continue to survive. And we are sort of obligated to teach our children how best to survive.

It’s interesting to speculate about our remote ancestors, or about what humans will be like down the road. But it doesn’t really mean anything. It is the here and now that matters, our lives and our children’s lives.

And survival seems to be the name of the game. It appears to be nature’s intent that a few of us, with the right stuff and a bit of luck, shall survive. But we have to work at it. And that is where security comes in.

To be secure, or relatively secure, requires constant vigilance. I watch a lot of nature films on T-V, and vigilance appears to be second nature to all wild animals.

Have you ever watched how alert and suspicious a deer is — even the tame deer of Shenandoah National Park. In the game preserve in Idaho where Pat and I camped throughout August, the deer would come up and eat out of your hand. But they never let their guard down; they always remained a bit suspicious.

That’s how they have come down without a single break in their billion years of descent. Everything in the animal kingdom — with the possible exception of humans — appears to be ever vigilant, always looking to their security.

For us, there are many kinds of security. There are endless kinds of physical security: bolted doors , locked windows, special electronic security systems, neighborhood watches, police protection, courts of law. Some people have guns, Mace, attack dogs, you name it. On a larger scale we have very expensive armies and navies to protect us from invasion and possible death or slavery.

Armies and navies are also designed to protect the economic well-being of their citizens — in our case, to protect the flow of foreign oil that gives us such a grand standard of living, our so-called American way of life. Because we, and people the world over, are also very much concerned with financial and economic security. We work hard at it, trying to make more money, to save more money, to protect what we save. In some countries the peasants, distrustful of their governments, cultivate gardens to assure themselves of enough food should the distribution systems break down for some reason. Other people hoard gold as the one true thing they expect to hold its value.

Life is a sort of tight rope that we have to continually walk, isn’t it. We could fall off at any time. And it is so easy to let our guard down, to believe that we, at least, live in a benign world. Yet disaster can strike so unexpectedly. Ask the parents of the kids that perished in the recent Halloween dance in Sweden; or the survivors of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras and Nicaragua.

Thirty years ago Ted, my handsome young son-in-law, a Navy lieutenant, Naval Academy graduate, went boar hunting with a friend in the wild, rugged mountains of California, just east of the Big Sur country. In the pre-dawn darkness they lost the trail. They separated in an effort to find it. Just then a freak storm, rain, wind, fog and snow moved in from the Pacific. You have to see the chaparral that covers those mountains to realize what a dense impenetrable thicket of shrubs and dwarf trees it is, even without fog and rain. Ted never made it back. It took Army and Navy search teams, including helicopters, nine days to find his body.

His friend did find his way back. He was lucky. They weren’t prepared, had no compass, or map, or adequate clothing, and apparently hadn’t checked the weather report.

Disaster can strike so unexpectedly.

There is, of course, no absolute security. Professional robbers can always break into our homes. Police are not adequate for complete protection. Drunk drivers may crash into us. On the economic side, our whole financial structure might collapse, as it almost did in 1929, and as it has done in some countries, like Germany after World War I. Life savings can be wiped out by illness, loss
of a job, or bad investments. ABC had a feature recently on how little most of us know about finance and investing, and how little our children know about saving.

We in this country are unbelievably prosperous. But so is much of the world. I’m not sure the human race can stand prosperity — the kind of prosperity that has enabled us to dominate nature, to a degree, and to multiply all out of reason. Sometimes I think civilization is like some flowers. They take a long time to mature, then flower briefly and die. I wonder if we, here at the end of
the 20th century, are in the flower stage.

In the past there have been devastating scourges that wreaked terrible tolls on human populations: the Black Death, the Thirty Years War in Europe, our American Civil War, the flu epidemic of 1918, World War II, to name a few. I am confident there will be other firestorms. Nature is not going to tolerate endless, runaway population growth, or an accelerating rape of the world’s resources, without exacting a price.

I realize, some of these dire scenarios seem pretty remote for us. But many of them are within the realm of possibility in the decades ahead. Let me suggest one that is not so remote. Your child, or your grandchild, or you nephew or niece, could be killed or badly crippled tonight, or next Saturday night, or on prom night, either as the driver or the passenger in a recklessly speeding car that crashes.

So what to do about security, ours and our children’s? And, since we are UUs, what is spiritual about all of this?

To me, there are two steps we can take that are superior to any others in securing our future survival and that of the children we love. I believe they will stand us in good stead no matter what the future may bring.

First, we can guard our health, physical and mental, because being strong and alert is our first line of defense. If we abuse our health, or don’t have a positive outlook on life, we are letting down our guard.

Second, we can educate ourselves in those things that will best protect us in case of calamity.. I’m not just talking about the education we get in schools — although that is very important — but also the practical knowledge about handling the everyday problems and hazards of living — a sort of street-wise wisdom, if you will, much of which we learn by word of mouth.

If we have those, health and knowledge — and character is implicit in both — then we are equipped to better face whatever the future may bring. And if we teach our children to cultivate good health, physical and mental, and a good well-rounded education, then they too will be better equipped to face adversity.

A little philosophy would be helpful to us also, and to them, should everything else fail. We must learn not to take ourselves too seriously. Die we all must, and if it comes sooner than later, it is better that we be philosophical about it.

As to the spiritual in all of this. I think I have already answered that: we are sort of obligated — by nature, or God, or providence — to do what we can to survive and to teach our children how best to survive. It seems it is what is expected of us. And that calls, not just for personal vigilance, but also to work for a more peaceful world.

People reflect and argue about the purpose of life. Some think the purpose of life is to worship God, so they can be saved and in the afterlife they can have eternal peace and joy. Others, in the Orient, think the purpose is to build good Karma in successive reincarnations so eventually they can attain nirvana and have eternal peace and bliss. That’s all fine, if you feel one of those is the purpose of life and it gives you peace.

I have a different view. I’ve lived a long time, and I have never found any purpose in life other than the living of it: facing the day; meeting life’s challenges; reveling in the beauty of a sunset or of child’s face; participating in the great adventures of life, the adventures of marriage and parenthood, of inquiry, and travel, of new people and old friends. In short, to take part in and enjoy the great cavalcade, the great, mysterious and magnificent pageantry of existence.

Why isn’t that enough? Why should we ask for more?

It seems to me that If nature has any purpose for us — other than just living — it must be to produce the next generation, so that generation can produce the next one, and on and on, ad infinitum. So possibly our purpose in life is, first, to survive, and secondly, to produce children and to train them to survive — that is, if we can have children and want children. If we can’t have children, or don’t want to have children, then maybe life’s purpose for us is to
help others survive and help them protect and teach their children to survive. So in the end, maybe life’s purpose is just for us, first, to survive, and then to be good parents, or good uncles or aunts, or maybe just good Samaritans.

[As I turned on the music, I said "April Fool." It was What a Beautiful World by Louis Armstrong  When it finished, I remarked that it was not April Fool after all; that the quot;Satchmo" really did give us a spiritual song. I then went right into my talk]

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world! And I think, what a world of beauty! This talk, or sermon if you please, is about beauty. Its about how beauty gives me — and I hope you — what for want of a better term, I shall call spiritual uplift. It’s also about the wonderful world we live in.

Some forty years ago I came across a brief supplication — a sort of supplication to oneself. It has remained with me all these years, and I often repeat it to myself. It goes like this: Stay with me, beauty, as the fire grows cold. Now, I don’t know what that meant, exactly, to its author. But I know what it means to me. I believe I draw strength in life principally from two aspects of love, my love for my family, especially for my wife, Pat; and my love for the beauty, and the wonder, of our world.

And so, when I say stay with me beauty, It means as I grow older, as my faculties fade, that I will continue to be supported by my love for the beauty of the universe, for my love of beauty in all its manifestations. And they are many.

But what is beauty?

Each of us, I imagine, has his or her own view. I doubt if any two are alike. Perhaps many of us have not thought about what we mean by beauty. Some things are just beautiful; that’s all. For some beauty is bright colors, of a sunset or a painting. For others it may be a religious image. For some it is a pleasing melody, or the architectural splendor of a great symphony, or the architecture of a building, the Taj Mahal, for instance. And, of course, beauty has for each of us many different forms.

We all employ the words beauty or beautiful in a multiplicity of ways. It can be the character of a great, good person — we say: she has a beautiful character. Or we speak of a beautiful gesture, or beautiful deed. Probably most of us say "what a beautiful woman," or "what a beautiful child." Some uses of the word are casual indeed — a beautiful car, the long drive of a golf ball off the tee, a broken field run by a football player.

For many, the night skies are beautiful and peaceful. Jeri Nielsen, the woman doctor rescued from Antarctica for a breast cancer operation, wrote in her book Icebound, of the "ecstatic wheel of stars" in that icy wilderness. We can be moved by such a vista, can be moved by a beautiful speech, a beautiful poem. A poem can make us feel more alive, more in tune, more appreciative of nature.

Whose woods these are, I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow

Robert Frost’s poem does that. We can feel the silence, can see the dark woods filling up with snow, and have a brief feeling of peace.

So, again, what is beauty?

Writers, philosophers, poets, religious leaders, have struggled with interpretations or definitions of beauty for thousands of years. The ancient philosophers discussed it at length.

Plato believed that there were perfect transcendental forms — in heaven, so to speak — for all things, and that everything in our sensible world, including abstract concepts such as beauty, were pale copies of those perfect forms.

Panaetius insisted that beauty of a visible object lies in the arrangement of its parts, and that this required a higher level of perception than animals have. Plotinus, the Neoplatinist, believed things possessing beauty were not only things seen or heard, but also "beauty in the conduct of life, in action, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect."

Early Christians had to admit there was such a thing as beauty, especially in the human body; and they wrestled with whether it was from Satan or was something they could embrace. Well, that preeminent Christian philosopher, Saint Thomas Aquinas, did embrace it. He said beauty consists in due proportion; because, he said, "the senses delight in things duly proportioned." He also said the beautiful is the same as the good.

Surprisingly, the great modern philosopher Emanuel Kant, so concerned with metaphysical and ethical inquiry, also found time to work out his own theory of aesthetics. I studied it one time as part of a philosophy course — pretty tough sledding. Essentially, he held that the judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment; that the satisfaction in the beautiful is "alone a disinterested and free satisfaction."

These, of course, are gross oversimplifications of what these thinkers had to say. The subject is vast. I checked out of the library a 400-page book on aesthetics. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy has 20 pages devoted to the subject.

Literature is filled with thousands of uses of the word beauty and many interpretations. I came across a little book of selected verse by Goethe, with English translations. I opened it near the middle. One line on that casually-selected page read: "Remembrance of what is beautiful is the salvation of mortal men." I don’t know what he thought was the salvation of women.

I recently read something rather poignant: Christa McAuliffe’s mother, as she waited for her school-teacher daughter to take off in the Challenger, described the view of the shuttle, steaming and awesome in its cradle in the gantry, as "beautiful." I used the same term as I watched another shuttle lift off in a fiery nightmare and climb through the dawn sky, trailing its long smokey plume, pink from the rising sun, as the shuttle became ever smaller on its outward journey to space.

I believe a shuttle launch is beautiful because it represents such a triumph of human imagination, ingenuity, and courage. And we are human, so it gives us a feeling of expansiveness. — a feeling of expansiveness

And that brings me to my definition of beauty, which is a broad one.

To me beauty is that which does give one that happy feeling of expansiveness: of being more alive; of being a living, breathing part of this vast universe. It is that which gives us a feeling of satisfaction that we can appreciate the richness of the world, that we are imaginative and sensitive and sensuous. Beauty is richness, abundance, magnificence. It makes us feel rich, abundant, magnificent. I believe that in a subconscious way, we become newly aware that we are human beings, we are homo sapiens. We have those great brains and fine sensibilities that enable us to cherish the world and our place in it, to judge perfection or at least an approach to perfection. We realize anew that we are humankind — we can appreciate beauty. These are not thoughts that we put into words, of course. They may not even be thoughts; they are more a satisfactory feeling, a warm glow, a feeling of peace. We look at a lovely sunset; the sensuous beauty of a handsome galloping horse; or the thick fur, the nice lines, and the intense eyes of a mountain lion, and we experience beauty. We don’t tell ourselves we have a feeling of expansiveness; or that we are superior, or rich, or magnificent. We just, for a moment, feel good.

We don’t all find beauty in the same way, of course. Some seem to find beauty only in nature, and they can’t imagine your finding beauty in a city scene. Well, I surrender first place to no one in my love of the wild places. The beauty of the natural world is one of my chief pleasures and I have many hundreds of photographs I have made to attest that — the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, the picturesque vistas of Carmel Bay, or the wild juxtaposition of mountain and rocky shore of the Big Sur country. Yet I have seen cityscapes that are among the most lasting impressions of beauty in my memory.

I remember well an early one of those city scenes. I was 19 and an friend and I had hitchhiked from Roanoke to the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1933. The fair had been built on reclaimed land jutting out into Lake Michigan. So they had piled large rocks at the waters edge to keep the shore from washing into the lake. One evening we went out to those rocks to eat our brown bag dinner. The fair hugged the shore, which curved around in a great arc as we looked to the west. It was after sundown and the sky glowed with color. And there on our left, along that great arc, were the magnificent, gaudy neon lights of the fair, yellow, green, blue, red, every color of the rainbow, contrasting with the more subdued colors of the sunset. I was ecstatic.

I recall a somewhat similar scene, years later, during World War II. I had taken a trainload of newly indoctrinated sailors from Idaho to San Francisco. They were bound for the receiving station at Treasure Island, which, as you may know, is just west of the San Francisco-Bay Bridge. The train came in to Oakland, so the Navy provided a couple of whaleboats to deliver the men across the bay to their destination. It was my first trip to San Francisco, but I had heard many things about that fabled city. My anticipation ran high. As we left the dock and headed west, it was a little after sundown, the same as in Chicago. As we proceeded through the bay, the western sky was pink, and blue, and turquoise. And there on the hills on my left the lights were coming on in San Francisco. What an introduction to that great city. I was enthralled.

And then one night in New York I emerged from a night club on the East side. I guess I had had one or two, or three, And there before me was a scene I shall never forget. It appeared there were a million lights, in front of me, above me, and as far as I could see to the right and to the left , for it seemed that all the windows in all the skyscrapers in New York were lit up  — like an immense jewel.

Views of these vibrant cities gave me that feeling of expansiveness..

Then there is another kind of beauty. I said my definition was broad. It even covers the feeling I get from reading a well-written piece on the great pageantry of human history, of evolution, of massive migrations, of Alexander the Great, or the power of the great world religions. It covers the effects of great scientific advances, like Newton’s laws, or the Hubble telescope. These readings, if they move me, I call beautiful. They also give me that feeling of expansiveness, make me feel more a part of the dramatic human march through
history.

But, in the final analysis, I believe that what I am mainly thinking about when I ask that beauty stay with me, are those simple beauties of the natural world, a colorful sunset, the stars on a clear night, the rise of a golden full moon; or snowy clouds against a dark blue sky, a winding stream in a meadow, or a bird on the wing. . Those are the types of beauty that sweep over me with a warm feeling of peace.

There is a southwest facing window in our bedroom. Whenever I see evidence of a colorful sunset I rush up to that window, or out to our second-story deck, to watch it. I can see much the same vista as I drive up to our garage. Often I pause there, especially if it is sunset, or if low clouds are curling up the mountain sides, and I sit for a moment to take in the view and feel its magic. Or I will go out on our second-story deck in the late evening just to look down on the lights of Harrisonburg and the dark mountains and pale sky beyond.

This love for natural beauty, I believe, is love for the world, for the universe, for life. Is there ugliness in the world. Of course there is. That’s the other side of the coin. But this is about beauty. Cancer is one of the ugliest things. If I get cancer, or some other bad thing, I hope I won’t let it ruin what’s left of my life. I hope I won’t let it blot out beauty. And as time passes, and the years go by, and I consider the calendar, that old supplication that I read many years ago, means more than ever to me. Stay with me beauty, as the fire grows cold.

When Beryl Lawson called me at the end of January and asked if I would put on a program March 22, and I agreed, she then asked me for a title, I was about to leave on an extended trip out-of-state, so off the top of my head I said "The Philosophy of a Lifetime." I leave to you if it is an appropriate title.

I suppose it is rather trite to say these are troublous times we are living in. I think we all realize there is widespread doubt about the traditionally accepted verities. Many of us -feel we are in a time of political, moral, intellectual – and I might even say – spiritual crisis. In addition to the historic problems that have beset complex civilizations, our society has to deal with many new and difficult ethical questions – ethical questions that the rapidly accelerating world of science has tossed at our doors. To say the least, we are confused.

There have been other times like this in history. The period around the beginning of the Christian era was such a time. There was confusion then about the meaning of life at a time when there was much poverty and much cruelty. As a result, there arose a great profusion of cults and soothsayers. One of these, with a message of hope for those times, became more successful than the rest.

Earlier, in the ancient Greek world, there was such a time when both the old mythological religion and the newer cosmological speculations were found wanting. These uncertainties gave rise to the Sophists with their rejection of all such ontological and cosmological cogitations. Forget trying to understand being and the meaning of life, they said look to the practical side of life, live for this life.

Today there is a widespread searching for not only a meaning to life, and an understanding of death, but also for some substrate, some standards, for a viable system of ethics to deal with our modern world. There is uncertainty, insecurity, even fear, of what the future holds, we are worried about ecology, the population explosion, the remoteness and instability of governments, and the terrible potential that the human race can eliminate itself from the planet. we feel helpless? we don’t know where to turn.

Once again the anthropomorphic religions are losing their credence. Yet our scientists and philosophers seem no nearer to arriving at an ultimate understanding of being, of ultimate truth, of the meaning – if any – of life, than the Greeks were in the Per id can period.

The organization of our little UU group is, I believe, evidence of our bewilderment. Many of you are searching – searching for something, perhaps you know not what.

Tonight I will try to bring you a message of hope.

Although I’m not sure hope is the right word. It is not hope for salvation in an afterlife, not hope for another existence in this world, or in another world, or in another dimension. Rather it is a philosophy of living – living in this world.

Wen I am through some of you may say that I am following in the footsteps of the Sophists, that mine is an inward looking, selfish philosophy bereft of any spirituality. Some may say it is sophistry, or even that it is sophomoric.

But I believe it is a philosophy which has the potential to make your life calmer, to give you more of a feeling of security, to lessen fear, to give you more courage to face the future, whatever it brings. It is a philosophy that has stood me in good stead since 1 was a teenager. Yes, since I was a teenager.

I remember, when I was just 19 years old, striding across some fields and voicing out loud to myself "I bring you a new religion; I bring you a new religion."

Well, that messianic feeling, that philosophical imperative, if you will, has never really left me. But, on the other hand, it has never produced a full, coherent, published message. My views have been formulated in my own mind, and I have discussed them with individuals, but you are the first group to whom I have unveiled these thoughts. And I would not characterize these views as a religion, but more – as I said ~ as a philosophy of living. Religion implies a numinous feeling, belief in a spiritual world, perhaps even faith in a personal god. Some of you may be looking for that. But that is not my message.

Since that day nearly sixty years ago when I strode across the fields in deep thought, I have done a lot of soul searching. I have studied many of our western philosophers and some of our Christian thinkers. I have studied Oriental religions – Zen, Buddhism, Hinduism. And while I have refined some of my thinking, the basic tenets of my belief have not changed since those long ago days.

I can’t hope in this brief time to impart to you a complete understanding of what I am proposing. But perhaps it will be enough to spark, the curiosity of some of you and we can discuss it further at another time.

This philosophy of mine is supported by three legs, three beliefs; first, that we live in a determinist world; second, antithetically, that we have free wills; and thirdly – and this is probably the most original and radical thought – that human emotions are balanced; that there is a natural law of compensation in human affairs. This third leg means that there is a balance of pleasure and pain in each of us; that there is, after all, a final justice for human beings (and, for that matter, for all living things), not in a next world, not in an afterlife, but in this world, in this life. Let me discuss the three pillars of my philosophy one at a time;

First, determinism, what is it? It is a belief in cause and effect; that every effect has a cause; that all the actions of our lives, up to this moment, were inevitable. Let me explain.

If you believe, as I do, that when a great symphony orchestra performs – let us say Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony -it was all in the cards, so to speak, a long time ago, eons ago, billions of years ago. If you believe every note, every finger movement of every musician, every batting of every eye in the orchestra and in the audience, was ! inevitable as far back in time as you want to go, then you are a determinist – not a soft determinist, but a hard determinist, as I am.

I doubt if many of you are. And I won’t try to adduce arguments in favor of that view tonight. It is not my main message. Let me just say that I have believed it with all my heart since high school days.

But now you ask, what about that second leg, a free will. If I am a determinist, how can I believe in a free will. If my every move, my every thought was in the works before I was born, where is the decision making, where is the free will. That is a contradiction, you says those are two diametrically opposed ideas, you say.

And I reply yes they are. I totally agree. But human thought is replete with contradictions. I expect there are contradictions in every religion, and in every philosophy. Let us take the idea of space. Can you imagine an end to space. To our finite minds, there would always have to be more space on the other side of the end. Yet we cannot imagine there not being an end to space. So we have a contradiction, we can’t really grasp the concept of infinity. The same thing holds true with time. we can neither imagine an end of time nor time without end. If you can, then you can grasp infinity.

So to be a determinist and yet to believe in a free will is indeed an inconsistency, a contradiction, a paradox. So be it. I will try to explain.

I have assigned a name to my belief that all things are determined, and yet that we each has a free will. I call it Dynamic Dualism. And Dynamic Dualism says we live in two worlds, a conceptual world and an everyday practical world. In the conceptual world we, or least I, can imagine a materialistic universe in which everything has a previous cause, a world of cause and effect; a determinist world. So as I have said, I am a convinced determinist. I believe my every action and every thought was in the works from – well, let us say – from the beginning of time, if there was a beginning of time.

But determinism is an intellectual concept only. It is a conversation piece in philosophical discussions. It is not something you and I can live by. we don’t live in a conceptual world, we live in an everyday world, a practical world of choices, we have to make choices, we cannot avoid it. we make hundreds of choices every day. I have to act. I have to believe that I have a free will. I choose to get up in the morning. I choose to go to bed at night. I choose to eat. I make lists. I plan. I see my plans come to fruition – well, at least part of the time. I study. I write. I seek. I choose to raise my arm, to clench my fist. I demonstrate before you my free wi11.

It impossible for anyone, even the most dedicated fatalist, to do nothing, to make no choices. One cannot sit around and wait for things to happen, we have to make them happen.

So, one may say – as I say – every action of my life up to this moment has been determined by my inheritance and the environmental forces impinging on me. Yet, as we face the future, the next moment, the next hour, the next day, we have to use our wills – our free wills, we have to believe we have free wills, we cannot make a choice without assuming that we have a choice.

So we live in two worlds, a conceptual world, the world of the past; and a subjective, practical, everyday world, the world of the present/future. As I look back on my life, up to this moment, I don’t see how I could ever have made any choices other than the ones I did make. But, as I look to the future, I know that I am the captain of my soul; I have a free will. I can make choices. I have to make choices. There is no other way I can live. I have to believe I have a free will.

It is that contradiction that I call Dynamic Dualism.

But what about the third, the most important pillar of my philosophy, the idea that there is a balance to human emotions. This third leg is not dependent on a belief in the first two. It can stand on its own.

I don’t take credit for this view. I absorbed it from an uncle, who in turn was influenced by Ralph waldo Emerson’s essay, "Compensation," from which you heard some quotations tonight. For some reason Emerson doesn’t seem to have followed up on it; so I will be his apologist.

This last is the most difficult of the three pillars of my philosophy to explain. But I will try. It is difficult because most arguments, most examples, are strictly subjective.

First of all, what do I mean by a balance to human emotions, a natural law of compensation. This view, like the first one, determinism, is rather materialistic, because it is like the law of physics that says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. By compensation I mean that pleasure is balanced by pain, and pain is balanced by pleasure; that happiness is balanced by nhappiness and unhappiness is balanced by happiness; that hope is balanced by fear and fear is balanced by hope.

Now let me ask you, if such were the case, would that not be justice for every individual; whether she lived 100 years, as my mother did; or two years, as my sister did. would not that be final justice in a world that appears completely unjust,

You may ask of me "How can you say that a poor man or woman, a deprived child, has the same balance of pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness, hope and fear, that a rich man or woman has, or a privileged child. And I will answer you that I cannot possibly quantify these emotions, even for myself. Nevertheless, that is exactly what I believe.

I take it on faith, on the basis of observation, on my own experience. I believe it because I don’t see how it could be any other way. You can’t make something out of nothing. Happiness cannot come from nothing. Pain cannot come from nothing. The one creates the other.

Let me explain, if I can, what I mean by pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness. I don’t mean that if you are ecstatic in the morning you will necessarily be deeply depressed in the afternoon. I don’t say that highs will always be balanced by equal lows, or vice versa. Sometimes highs and lows are so minimal that we don’t recognize them as such.

I regard boredom, ennui, as pain. It is a low grade of pain, but pain nevertheless. A long period of boredom, or mild difficulty, or annoying frustration, might be balanced by a short period of soaring good feeling – such as a mountain climber might feel on reaching the top after a long and arduous struggle up the mountain. Such a rush of good feeling is happiness. For the mountain climber it balances out the low grade pain of the long climb.

Likewise I regard a mild good feeling, the pleasure of a good book, or a soft breeze on your cheek, as happiness. Happiness doesn’t have to be soaring; it can be low key, mild, hardly noticeable as happiness. But if it goes on for some time it amounts to quite a bit of pleasure, of good feeling. And it can be balanced by a sharp rush of pain or unhappiness.

Hopeful anticipation is a pleasure; it is happiness. Disappointment is pain; it is unhappiness. One might say; "I could see the pain in his face." You could say that of someone who has lost an athletic contest, or a spelling bee. He or she is in pain; they are unhappy. And the more confident the pleasurable anticipation of winning, the greater the pain on losing. It is a question of balance; of compensation.

The pain and uncertainty of a long recuperation is balanced by the hope of recovery, the pleasure of progress, the anticipation of being wel1.

Are any of us so naive as to think the rich are happier than the rest of us. Of course we know they are not. We know in our hearts that behind the walls of their great houses there are many kinds of pain, many disappointments, many frustrations, self doubt, personal loss, fear, despair. They pay for their leisure, their comfort, their fine possessions, as Emerson says, in silence and certainty.

All right, so what is hopeful, what is helpful in this philosophy of mine. What in this view leads to calmness, a feeding of security, a lessening of fear?

I believe this faith, if you truly embrace it, will smooth out the peaks and valleys of your emotions. Your highs may not be as high but your lows will be more bearable. Your moments of joy may be compromised somewhat by the knowledge that you will pay for them. But your depressions will not be as deep, because you will know that sooner or later the reaction will set in, the balance will be achieved.

You simply learn that everything has its price – that in human emotions, just as in the practical everyday world of human intercourse, there is no free lunch.

You learn that the pursuit of happiness, a search for a sort of permanent good feeling that can be built up, like money in the bank, is a chase after a wi11-o-the-wisp. There is no such thing. The bank account is fluid. It is constantly fluctuating between good feeling and bad feeling, between surplus and deficit.

Life is an adventure. It is interesting, but it exacts its price. You cannot create something out of nothing. Emotions are relative. Pain and pleasure are opposite sides of the same coin. You can’t have the one without the other. You have to learn to accept the price.

So there you have its Dynamic Dualism and compensation; determinism and yet a free will. And a balance, in each of our lives, of pleasure and pain. Final Justice.

I don’t know if there is much there to satisfy any spiritual quest that you may have. But to me there is a positive spiritual concept in the thought that there is justice in nature.

And there is one other things Some will say there is no basis in these views for right behavior, for a system of ethics that society can live by.

I deny that. I believe there is a firmer foundation in these views for personal ethical behavior and for a socially acceptable system of ethics than there is in didactic moralizing from some ancient written word.

But the arguments in its favor are subtle, and there is not time to go into them tonight. Perhaps some other time. For now, let me just say that I have given you my philosophy, one that I have found satisfying for all these many years. It is my philosophy of living; a philosophy of a lifetime.

Twice before, as some of you recall, I’ve talked to this group about my philosophy. The first talk was more than five years ago, the second some three years ago. Today I will talk about morality.

What? you might ask, is this old sinner doing talking about morality. Well I guess we are all sinners to an extent — depending on your definition of sin. I’m going to talk about a little different basis for morality, a different approach; a different reason to be moral. All the old bases, the old reasons, seem to be failing. What I have to say may seem a radical reason for moral behavior. But I think, to a certain extent, it’s a feeling we all have, instinctively.

What are my qualifications for talking on this subject? Well, for one thing, I’ve had a long life. Of course old age doesn’t necessarily bring wisdom. But I have seen much, have done quite a bit, and most importantly, I have thought a great deal. I have thought long and hard about being, the cosmos, infinity, the nature of life and death, and many of the other questions that philosophers and religious thinkers have wrestled with over the centuries. It seems to have been my nature to think about such questions since my early teens.

Some years ago I took courses at JMU in philosophy and Oriental religions. In 1985 I received a second bachelor’s degree, this one in philosophy. I took these courses because I wanted to be conversant with the thinking and terminology of the great thinkers of the past. My studies confirmed for me the fundamental beliefs I had held for most of my life.

Now I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve been living in an ivory tower. I have had many of the same heartbreaks, many of the same joys that you have had ~ or that you will have. I have been married three times and divorced twice. I have children and grandchildren. I am descended from Catholics on one side, and from Protestants on the other. I’ve lived in the South and in the
North, in the West and in the Midwest.

I’ve seen a lot of life and a lot of the world. As a teenager and as a college student I worked at a variety of jobs in several cities. I’ve played many sports, I’ve driven motorcycles and piloted airplanes. As a new college graduate I taught in a one-room school in the mountains of Southwest Virginia — six grades in one room. I’ve been a reporter for a newspaper and for the Associated Press, have known governors and shaken hands with presidents. As a World War II officer in the Navy, I’ve seen the military at first hand. I have built buildings, created exhibits, managed museums, directed a state-wide commemoration program.

I have traveled throughout this great country of ours, and on all the continents except Antarctica. I have gazed upon the Taj Mahal, the Himalayas of Nepal, have seen the slums of Bombay. My wife Pat and I have toured the Holy Land – Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth; we saw the walls of Jericho and sailed on the Sea of Galilee. We cruised the Nile, toured the ancient Egyptian city of Karnak, crossed the river to the Valley of the Kings.

I tell you these things, not to brag — I’ve just been lucky — but rather to let you know that I’ve seen a lot of the world and a lot of my fellow man and woman.

I’ve crossed the Atlantic by plane and by ship; and the same with the Pacific. I’ve ridden Japan’s Bullet Train, have seen some of the horrors of the red light district of Bangkok. I’ve seen the splendor of Versailles, and castles in Vienna, Madrid, Prague. I’ve shuddered at the sites at Auschwitz.

So I’ve seen a lot. But all of that would mean nothing in what I have to say to you, if I had not been thinking and questioning all along the way of the meaning of it all. Also, when I was young I had a guru. My guru was my Uncle Leslie. He had, in my estimation, a brilliant mind and a rare insight into the nature of we human beings. Today I give you my own elaboration on Leslie’s thought.

Let me review a bit: The first time I talked with you, I spoke of my view of life after death. I said I didn’t believe in life after death, in the usual sense of the word. But obviously what we are and what we do in life continues after our deaths. Like the waves from that proverbial pebble that is tossed into a pond, what we are and what we do goes on and on and on, with influences, however small, in our universe. Our lives are like little light bulbs, turned on for a moment and then turned off, but our rays, our deeds, go on for ever.

I said in that first talk that because I do not believe in life after death for the individual, I have no fear of death. I said if I were in an airplane 30,000 feet up that began a dive to certain destruction, I would be thankful that I had been a conscious part, for a little while, of this great and mysterious Universe. I would know that I as an individual would be no more, the pattern that was I would be gone; but all I had been and all I had done, like the rays of that little light bulb, would go on forever as a continuing influence in the Universe.

Three years ago I spoke to you again, and what I said then is the basis for my message today. I labeled it a message of hope. It was my prescription of hope for the individual. It was about salvation — not salvation from some jealous God who has been keeping track of whether we are good or evil. But rather salvation from despair, mitigation of those low points in life when all seems hopeless. It was both a philosophical and psychological message.

I said that pain and pleasure are opposite sides of the same coin and that they balance. And that this is the ultimate justice in the world. I said that happiness and unhappiness balance out, and that there is, in the long run, no excess of either for the individual. That therefore, if you can keep this in mind, it will smooth out the ups and downs in your life. It will temper your moments of triumph, and bring you down to earth a bit; but it will also help you over those devastating low points, those heart-rending developments in our lives, disappointments, foreboding, losses, even tragedies. I said it was the ultimate justice for all living things.

And now for the balance of this talk I want to lay the groundwork for my belief that this concept of justice can be a different basis for morality. It seems our world is so crying for some basic morality — some surcease from hate, violence, envy. . . greed — crimes of all kinds.

Every religion tries to articulate a system of justice in our world. Christianity looks to the next world to right the apparent injustices of this one. The meek shall inherit the earth. Sins will be paid for; good works will be rewarded; the evil will be punished, the righteous will occupy the house of the lord. This is Old Testament justice, and it has been the basis of morality in the Christian world — morality based on the fear of God. You must pray to be delivered of your sins so that you may have salvation.

Some of the oriental religions hold that while this life is a veil of tears, there will be eventual justice after many lives, many reincarnations. After you have built up much good karma, your soul will be freed from the dreadful cycle of life and death, of misery, and it will be one with the absolute, the ultimate mind which is beyond all knowing. If either of these beliefs gives you solace and a reason to be moral, well and good.

Like most religions, both are based on some written word. In that great film, ”Lawrence of Arabia,” the Arab leader, arguing that’ something was impossible, said: “It is written.” He was voicing our old reliance on some ancient written text — in his case, no doubt, the Koran. We have relied on texts written by men no wiser than our thinkers of today, and who were without our scientific knowledge of the world and of the mind.

There is not much evidence that the idea of punishment or reward in an afterlife has led to a very moral world, not only in modem times but throughout history.

Jesus said you should love your neighbor, you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I’m not a great student of the New Testament, but so far as I know, he didn’t give a reason other than reward in the afterlife. So far as I know he didn’t say it would make you feel good. Maybe he did. At any rate, that is what I am saying to you today. It will make you feel good. Some scholar said there is a version of the golden rule in all religions.

Well, more about that later. Let me repeat some of the arguments I gave you in my second talk for a balance between happiness and unhappiness, or between pain and pleasure, which are really the same things.

I suggest to you that justice is inherent in our lives if in fact pain and pleasure are balanced for the individual in this life. I say to you that justice is achieved if happiness and unhappiness complement each other, if they are, so to speak, opposite sides of the same coin. I don’t see how it could be any other way. If your life is balanced between pleasure and pain, is that not justice? Or
do you feel you were promised a bowl of cherries. Do you think you should always be happy, or at least happy most of the time.

On what do I base this strange idea that the poor are no less happy and no more unhappy than the rich; that the lame are no less happy, and no more unhappy, than the hale and healthy. Where do I get this idea that pain is rewarded with pleasure, that fear is rewarded with hope, that happiness is paid
for with unhappiness.

Well, for one thing, it is part of the written word. Philosophers have been saying as much for a long time. They may not have been saying they exactly balance, although Ralph Waldo Emerson said it, I believe, in his essay entitled “Compensation.” “The dice of God are always loaded,” he wrote, “Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.” He also wrote: ‘There is always some leveling circumstance that puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially on the same ground with all others.”

On what else do I base this belief  this conviction — that there is this leveling influence in people’s emotional lives? I base it on observation: observation of my own emotions over a long life; observation of other people; observation of animals, and even observation and contemplation of the physical world.

As Emerson said, there is a leveling influence everywhere. The waves of the ocean are leveled, but also the mountains are leveled; the peaks and the valleys are brought in line. Astronomers tell us that great suns die. And history tells us that great nations fall, great families dwindle away; towering figures of history are brought low.

Life is not a bowl of cherries. Show me where there was ever such a promise — not even in Mother Goose. If you want to know what life is like, watch the television program, “Nature,” on Public TV Sunday evenings. But it’s not just on the Africa’s Serengeti Plain that the rule, eat or be eaten, is in effect. It’s in our own back yards, in our woods and fields, where life is a continual battle for survival, and the great majority of the young never make it. Do you think that this human animal, just because it has a superior brain, has escaped those relentless laws of Nature.? I doubt it, over the long haul.

Why do I believe that pleasure and pain are balanced for those animals that fight a desperate fight for survival, most of them never succeeding to maturity. I take it on faith. I believe in justice. I believe that life is as just for the antelope that is cut down when half grown as for the lioness that broke the antelope’s neck. I believe life was as just for my sister who died at the age of two as it was for my mother who lived to be 100.

I take it on faith that it couldn’t be any other way — not because of a compassionate God that arranges it that way, but because of natural laws. There is a duality in the world, as Emerson pointed out: male and female, hot and cold, up and down, in and out, positive and negative, strong and weak, day and light, life and death, pain and pleasure.

When I have high excitement, I know that I am often riding for a fall. Somewhere the inevitable reaction sets in. Have you ever noticed how a small child laughs most deliriously just before he or she starts to cry.

There is a reason for pain. It is Nature’s warning system. It tells us something is amiss, something is dangerous to our well being or even our existence. Pain is for survival. It is also for development. It is the pain of rejection that makes a young man or a young woman careful about human relations, or human commitments. It is the pain of embarrassment, the pain of wounded pride, that drives people to overcome defeat, to overcome deficiencies, to overcome discrimination.

Pain is for survival. Pleasure is for reward. The pleasure of eating is so we will eat, and thus sustain ourselves. Eating relieves the tension, the pain of hunger. The pleasure of sex is so the species will continue. It relieves the tension, the pain of desire. The pleasure of reading is that it makes us feel whole, more expansive; it relieves the feeling of boredom, of footlessness.

I take it on faith that the laws of physics apply to life. Every action causes an opposite and equal reaction. One sacrifices speed for power. A screw turns slowly, but it exerts far more power than just pressing or lifting. A switchback road up a mountain, with many hairpin curves, is much longer than one that would goes straight up, but it makes it easier to negotiate the climb, and with less power. You sacrifice today for gain tomorrow. Money and time spent on education pays dividends in the future. And good deeds pay dividends. You’ve heard it said many times: you get out of a relationship what you put in it. Tit for tat.

Let us assume for the moment that I am right —that pleasure and pain are balanced, that happiness and unhappiness are balanced. Let us examine whether, if we were convinced of that, it could be the basis for moral behavior, for friendlier and more peaceful communities — families, churches, neighborhoods, society as a whole.

Suppose everyone was convinced that wealth does not bring happiness — does not, that is, bring more happiness than one would have without it. If we were all convinced we could be just as happy with a modest life style as with a rich and elaborate one, would that not do much to eliminate the grasping greed, the keeping up with the Joneses, the arrogance and egotism that characterizes so much of our society? Would it not do much to eliminate the envy, the hate, the intolerance that we see so much of?

Take lying, for instance. If lying doesn’t profit us, give us more happiness than we would have otherwise, why lie? Why should I lie to my friend or my neighbor or my spouse, if all that is going to do is diminish my relationship with that person? I don’t think it matters whether the other person knows you are lying or not. You know it. And so it reduces the value of the relationship. You know you are not a trustworthy person, you have been diminished in your own self esteem. “No man is an island, entire of itself,” said John Donne.

Why would you want to cheat on your spouse, if you knew that it would only diminish the quality of your most important relationship? It wouldn’t matter if your spouse knew; the relationship would be diminished anyway. You would have deceived yourself, as well as your partner, and you would know it.

If it is meaningless to try to keep up with the Joneses, why would you do it? If it does not bring more happiness, but only breeds envy, greed, and possibly ruthlessness; why would you do it? Why would a banker abscond with money from his bank if he knew in his heart that the rich life the money would buy is an illusion? Why would he take that chance?

Why would anyone murder another person, if he knew that he would be injuring himself more than the victim? The victim would be beyond remorse, while the perpetrator, whether caught or not, would have to live with the act for the rest of his life.

Why would anyone be envious? Emerson said there comes a time in everyone’s life when he realizes that envy is ignorance and imitation is suicide. Why would you envy someone else if you knew that person’s life was really no happier than yours — that he paid in more than money for his big house, that she paid in more than money for her fine clothes?

I have a 10-year-old clipping from the Northern Virginia Daily. It told about Tommy Hart of Grottoes, who lived with his wife in a one-room shanty. He picked up aluminum cans along the highway for money. He found a wallet with $150 in it, and he turned it over to the police. He said: “I don’t keep things that don’t belong to me. Honesty means more to me than anything else. It means more than all the money in the United States,” That man valued his self respect more than $150.

Lou Gehrig knew he had a terminal disease when he retired from baseball. He made his farewell speech in Yankee stadium. He said: ‘Today I consider myself one of the luckiest men on earth; I may have been given a bad break, but I have an awful lot to live for.”

What if a whole society were convinced that the pursuit of happiness through material goods, through lying and cheating, through drugs, through hate, through revenge, through trickery, was an illusion? Would that not make for a more moral society? Would that not go a long way toward eliminating crime, drugs, envy, and greed?

All right, you say; so far so good. But there is a flip side to that argument. What if the person says to himself, it doesn’t matter what I do, I will have just as much happiness? I can steal a little money from the store, and buy a few extra things for myself and my family, and that better living will make up for any guilt I may feel. I can cheat on my wife, or my husband, and the pleasure of the encounter will make up for any remorse I might feel. I can do drugs, and the good feeling will make up for the damage it does to me later.

Well, I think we all know the answer to that last one. Drugs reap a terrible price. But what about the other scenarios? Those are good questions. Why indeed, if pleasure equals pain, if happiness and unhappiness are balanced, why should I walk the straight and narrow?

I’ll give you my answer: It is because we are social animals. Humankind, like most mammals, has a nurturing instinct, and a sympathetic instinct. I think it grows out of the need to nurture the young. I think the social instincts of many animals is an extension of this basic nurturing and sympathetic characteristic. It leads to the extended family, such as the lion pride, or the wolf pack. And it is reinforced by the acquired instinct that a larger social group makes for greater security.

In humans this basic social instinct, this propensity for community, has been reinforced, not just by the need for security, but also by the advantages of trade, of specialization, the pleasures of association and mutual enjoyment of culture.

The social instinct has led to the enlarged family, eventually to the tribe, to the nation, to the race, and today, for more enlightened people, to a feeling of brotherhood for humanity as a whole. And because we are social animals, we need a common philosophy; a religion if you will; a common ethos to help us live in harmony with one another. And like good manners, the idea of getting along peacefully must be cultivated.

We are a social animal. We don’t have the fear of God anymore, but we have the fear of being condemned by our fellows, our close family members, our neighbors, our townspeople. More importantly, we want to feel good about ourselves. Our egos come into play. We want to feel we are good specimens, some of nature’s noblemen and noblewomen. We want to feel we are in tune, in tune with nature, a healthy mind in a healthy body with a healthy outlook on the world. Most of us want to feel we are good parents, good family members, good neighbors, good citizens. We want to conform to what is generally held as right and good.

Now imagine, if there were a wide-spread conviction that the philosophy, or religion, or whatever, that I have outlined was true. Would that not make for a more moral community, whether that community were the family, or the neighborhood, or the nation, or the whole civilized world?

If it were generally held that anything one did that detracted from another person also detracted from the perpetrator, if most people believed that stealing, lying, cheating were stupid because they damaged the person who did these things, would that not lead to a more moral society?

If it were the generally received view in our community — or in our world — that good deeds result in good vibes, and that destructive behavior is destructive to the perpetrator, would that not make for a more moral community? Would not most people want to get on the band wagon? Would anyone want to consciously work to his or her own detriment or destruction?

If it were generally held that to be above your fellows was not acceptable, if keeping up with the Joneses was frowned upon, if a simple but rewarding life for everyone was looked upon as the norm, would that not make for more contentment, less envy, less greed, less crime — and a further dividend — less stress on the environment.

I think it would!

But how is this philosophy, or religion, or way of life to come about? I don’t know. Certainly not from me. I’m an old man. Perhaps from one of you. Maybe I’ll elaborate on these thoughts and try to publish them some day, and if so, possibly some charismatic person will spread the word.

In the meantime, you don’t have to wait. You can put this philosophy to work at any time. If what I have said enables any of you to live calmer lives, encourages you to eschew the continual accumulation of material wealth and keeping up with the Joneses, and thereby leads you to be an even more moral person, I’ll be glad.

You don’t have to wait for the whole world to adopt these views, or the whole country, or even your local community. You can put them into practice at any time, in your own family, or even in just your own behavior and outlook on life.

At any rate, these beliefs will continue to give me strength and calmness and reasons to be moral. However moral I might be, it is not because I have a fear of God, or of punishment or reward in the afterlife. If I am moral it is because it makes me feel that I am a viable, well-adjusted social animal to be so.

It is because I know there is no profit in lying, or cheating, or anti-social behavior; in hate or revenge, or brutality. I see the folly of grasping, of wanting ever more material goods. I choose a social plus rather than a social minus in my life. And, with Emerson, I believe every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.