History may be servitude,

History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

T. S. Eliot

When I was a boy, until I left home for college I lived with my family on the banks of the James River. It was four miles to the other shore and so it was natural for a child to imagine, far out in the channel, the three small ships of the first immigrants sailing upstream. We picnicked at Jamestown Island, climbing about the ruins of the old church, playing that the Indians were coming through the swamp, remembering the first awful winter and malaria. We were heroes filled with hope; we were at home in our world. Better yet were the bicycle trips twenty miles from our house to Yorktown. There we saw the cannon balls still embedded in the houses; we heard in imagination the dejected British band playing, "The World Turned Upside Down"; we visited the lovely white Moore house where General Washington received the surrender of Lord Cornwallis. But best of all were the visits to Williamsburg even before the restoration. There was the ground where the House of Burgesses had been; there the Raleigh Tavern where young Tom Jefferson danced with Belinda in the Apollo Room; there the beautiful Bruton Parish Church, the enclosed pews marked with what great early Americans had worshiped there; and somehow most moving of all for a child that architectural gem, the Wren building. It was here that Jefferson studied ethics under Doctor Small, a professor of mathematics, which Jefferson described as "my good fortune, that probably fixed the destinies of my life."

I went to Stonewall Jackson School, and so he, too, became a hero for his courage and commitment. It was painful to recall that frightening evening when, at dusk, his own men mistook him for the enemy and killed him. (Strangely, that story became for a child a myth of life.) Lee, of course, was the greater hero and, as in many Southern homes, there on the sun porch was the picture of him astride Traveller sitting with such straight dignity it was impossible to see how he could ride without being jarred from the saddle. Even a boy could understand that night he was offered command of the Union forces, a night he spent pacing the floor, and even a boy could be proud when he decided to stay with his native country Virginia yet believe he made the wrong decision. We also often visited Fortress Monroe, listened to band concerts and played on the battlements, knowing that President Lincoln had come to that very spot during the war. (One did not then have to ask, "What war?" Living where and with whom I lived it was not surprising that Lincoln was as great a hero as Lee, and, indeed, when about ten the only fight I had with my best friend was because he insulted Lincoln. So when I visited Gettysburg, I was a confused boy and didn't know whether to hope that (this time) Lee would get key battle orders through on time or to hear and believe Lincoln talking about "a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

On Sunday afternoons we would drive in the Model T through the beautiful Hampton Institute campus. On those rare, most wonderful times of all our bachelor uncle would stuff his pockets with hard peanut candy and take us on the rollicking street car the ten miles to the College where we would go to a concert. I cannot know all that we talked about on those trips but at some early age Booker T. Washington became a hero and I was led to understand that if only I was as conscientious as he I might make something of my life. (My admiration for him, of course, caused me real trouble in the sixties when many black friends scorned him.) It was my Southern grandmother who first came to admire Washington. She had been four when her home in Georgia was burned by stragglers from Sherman's army. Her clearest memory, next to the burning and the fear, was of the handsome Yankee captain who saved her life. (She fell in love with him, and of such childish loves perhaps later reconciliations are made.) A few years ago I visited Auburn where she had later moved so her children could go to college, and as we drove by a black church, my uncle said, "Once when Mama was teaching a Sunday School class there she asked, 'Who died for your sins?' Hands went up, and the first small child to answer said, 'Booker T. Washington.' 'Well,' she said, 'That's not who I had in mind, but he will do.'" It is no wonder he became a hero in our family.

Others, closer in time, were more remote but to a young boy they also became heroes: Theodore Roosevelt and his "Square Deal," Woodrow Wilson and his dreams of a peaceful world, a world made safe for democracy. All of these persons were dead before I first heard about them. Yet to a child they were very much alive, and still are today. "The communication/Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living." For a young boy the fire of every one of these persons was the fire of liberty, and, since then, though I have come to recognize the human flaws in each, it is that flame that still burns most fiercely, most dangerously.

I have reported these myths of my life for various reasons. One is to make clear that what I understand ethics to be has been a part of my life as long as I can remember. Another is to make clear that any writing about the history of ethics is not a personal academic exercise but a personal, painful experience. For my life, like that of so many others in our nation and world (especially the West), is at stake in what happens now to how we preserve and expand our ethical tradition. Often I wish that I could be as simple and as clear as Augustine:

AWhat do you want to know?@

AGod and the soul.@

ANothing more?@

ANothing more.@

But my life has often not been that simple or clear, and so I must ask myself, as I believe everyone must: AWhat do I want to know?@ And for me the answer is: what it is to be fully human in a human society. For this is the theme of Western ethics: what it means to be and to become a human individual in a human community. And, of course, this answer leads inevitably to other concerns, concerns which more often than not appear to us as questions: education, equality, friendship , faith, freedom, politics, love, and what is the essential nature of the individual=s relationship with the self, others, society, and the world.

For me the purpose of studying and writing about the history of Western ethics has always been to help myself and others create and understand my own ethic with greater clarity, for the ultimate goal is the passionately integrated life. And in the first place I believe this can only be done when I understand and share with others what has been given to us by our past. For each individual=s ethics are formed in those special border crossings between the individual and their community. For the history of ethics is the history of the discovery of moral truth, and of the loss of moral truth, and it is through the recognition of this discovery and loss, that each individual can come to embody the truth in their own life. And I believe that the embodiment of that truth, or the failure to embody it--which has a close connection with beauty--is the most important fact about a person=s life.

So, I believe that part of our tradition (which is both Greek and Hebraic) is that we study ethics in order to become good, that is more fully human. Of course, it is not possible to arrive at a final, complete, and accurate truth in understanding one=s own ethic or that of others. There is no perfect expression of an ethic. But what we can have is the habit of active thought about life. This comes from making connections, from creating insights, and then though rational thought, whether alone or with others, from correcting, adapting to, and improving in clarity and depth the connections and insights. Yet, looking back as we must, still we must live in our own time, for moral philosophy also arises from and is directed toward personal moral experience.

What then is the nature of our own time? George Steiner in his famous Charles Eliot Norton lecture at Harvard makes a striking assertion about the essential requirement for a responsible theory of culture in our time.

A theory of culture, an analysis of our present circumstance, which do not have at their pivot a consideration of the modes of terror that brought on the death, through war, starvation, and deliberate massacre, of some seventy million human beings in Europe and Russia, between the start of the first World War and the end of the second, seems to me irresponsible.

These words might well have been written about moral philosophy except in that case the pivot is in the experience rather than the consideration of the modes of terror. And it is not just the experience of those modes of terror that is essential for the creation of an adequate ethic. It is the full integration of the experience into a life in order that, later, the experience emerges transmuted in a moral philosophy.

In our age then, who are these persons who have experienced, and who still experience, the modes of terror? They are the refugees, the displaced persons, the prisoners of war and of conscience. They are those who have been forced by the nation states to move from their homes, from all that is familiar and beloved in their lives. They are forced to move without possessions to an alien place. Their freedom and community is taken from them: they move as prisoners or, at best, as dependents, their communities destroyed. They are forced to begin new life, or forced to die. For the 20th century will be known as the century of the homeless.

These persons are the reality and the symbol of the 20th century, as they are likely to be of the 21st, and there have been and are literally millions of them, and it is not only in German concentration camps or in Russian pogroms, but on every continent and in every country that the violated have existed and exist. For whenever we try to think of human life in our time some of the most compelling images are those of the strangers we have seen who have been forced to leave their homes and can never return to the familiar land and life they have loved. Millions of these travellers are now silent, for they have accepted the burden of death. Millions of these are refugees whose numbers increase incrementally each year. But no one can have an image of millions, and consequently the image that most often disturbs the mind is that of individual persons, the plight and suffering of the individual. And yet when we multiply that individual by the millions, how, we wonder, can the moral ideals of the West thrive?

Yet these homeless are not only the literal refugees and prisoners, those who would be recognized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees or Amnesty International, but in a more fundamental feeling, it is our own lives that we see in theirs. For in an elemental sense, and in a way unprecedented for so brief a time in human history, repeated waves of new cultures have flooded in upon the old forcing almost all persons to flee from the familiar and the beloved, to make radical adjustments, to begin a new life in a spiritual sense or to die.

In this respect it is important to recognize what the displaced persons have contributed to the new cultures in which they have shaped their new lives. For their contributions to the renewal of European culture whether on the continent, in Britain, America, Israel, or the European Pacific have been incalculable. In the natural and social sciences, in all the arts (where would contemporary painting and music and literature be without them?), in history, in diplomacy and politics, in business and the professions: everywhere there has been creative development in Western culture it has been the violated of our time, those who have experienced the violence and known the anomie, who have made many of the most significant contributions. But this has not happened in moral philosophy. Here the contribution of the displaced has been more ambiguous. Here the refugees have not contributed directly to a moral philosophy but rather to a moral life. For it is they who have manifested the indomitable spirit of individual struggle. It is they who have embodied and enacted human freedom in ways unsurpassed by any previous persons in history. They have shown us what it means to be a person in a human community, to be a free person in a free world.

This is what the displaced persons have done. Indeed, the very depth of the ethical life of many refugees accounts in large part for their extraordinary contributions in all fields except ethics. Those contributions can be seen as the expression of the will to live, the will to be free and to find meaning in the world. For it has been an enormously difficult task for the violated of our time to live as persons and to manifest the meaning of their lives in creative human work.

These images of those who have felt forced from their homes will not fade. This is another reason why I wanted to begin this final chapter with a personal history, for are we not all now, refugees from a familiar past, immigrants in an alien present? So the inescapable questions come before our moral lives: how can we who are spiritual refugees become transformed into spiritual pilgrims? How can the stranger carve out a home in this new world? How, in short, can we create from our past and in our own difficult present, a living moral faith by which we all might live?

Moral philosophy arises from moral experience. In any period of history, therefore, an ethic adequate for the needs of persons living fully in their time can only be created by those who have lived deeply in that age, allowing the age to live in them. But how the transition is made from this crucial experience to the ethic, from an encased, enclosed life to one of freedom, makes all the difference, for the transition cannot take place immediately or suddenly, though in the act of making, in the act of creating this project, we are in fact, creating our own lives. For this act of self creation there must be first remembrance and reflection. Then there must be engagement, the creation of new insights, and a freshness of faith which we have not known before. The study of ethics can, at least, help us in this exploration. It can help us make of our history a living tradition, whose final goal is to develop a creative, free moral agent.

Remembrance:

It has never been an easy marriage, but it has endured, and more than endured it has been a constant source of renewal for everyone in the Western family. The marriage here is the original couple of Western ethics: the two partners of the Greeks and the Judeo-Christian tradition. These two parents have been the primogenitors in the creation of a shared Western ethical identity; a basic Western moral personality. For all ethical experience and thought since the establishment of the ethical identity in the West has been related to Greek and Hebraic experience, though it is far from certain that this will be the case in the future. But the origins of our family tree are clear, for it is the Greek philosophers and the Hebrew prophets who have together established our identity and set the essential tasks that have determined our growth and failure. Others have added and elaborated on this basic moral core, but it is these two who are our rightful ancestors. For both, the essential question was one of authority: What is the source of authority? For one, the answer was a conversational thinking, while for the other, it was manifested in a living relationship with a Holy Other.

For the Greeks it was the sense that there were truths, external to human beings. This sense of truth brought with it the centrality of certain words: reason (both as a means of discovery and the means of directing action once the discovery has been made), dialogue, ideas, order, structure, goals, purpose (the conflict between means and ends), the individual, happiness, balance and harmony. For the Greeks, justice was discoverable, interpretable and enforceable. Friendship was essential to the full life, and thinking (as impersonal objectivity) was directed toward the world as empirical fact.

For the Hebrews it was the covenant: a determinative bond between a non-historical Holy Other and an historical people. This covenant also accented certain words like: promise, trust, responsibility, faithfulness, loyalty, duty and thus correspondingly their opposites: sin, and then the treatment of sin: forgiveness. For both there was the awareness of the essential conflict between justice and love, and in between the two, the centrality of suffering. Crucial to both was the sense of embodiment, of living one=s ideals and of service to the community. For both, ethics was a matter of individual and social fulfillment.

The Roman Stoics and Augustine expanded the understanding of ethics to the whole world, and felt that ethics could provide a comprehensive ordering of life. Though their understanding of the source was vastly different, for both a reasonable valuing became the basis of all life. This living unity of thought and action, of history and eternity was carried over into the medieval age where the major figures there embraced a shared sense of meaning, an overarching order that gave each individual a sense of their own place and value. But while faith was the sine qua non for this segment of history, at the same time there was a growing seed in faith=s soil: the seed of individuality, and in the Renaissance this seed would break the surface, prosper and flower in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century into the political foundations of democracy itself, but also ontologically the individual became the focus of all values.

As the Renaissance and reformation broadened into the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century, the old unity was shattered. There were multiple possibilities for creating meaning, and values became a matter of personal choice rather than adherence to a community standard. From a plethora of often conflicting sources the individual was left free, or cut adrift, to create their own individual ethical stance. The search, the journey, the quest became the central underlying metaphor for this creative act. Equally implicit in this quest was a sense of optimism, a sense that this best of all possible worlds could yet be made even better, that goodness was natural, and that there were principles, natural human rights, which were universal and could transcend political boundaries. But the inherent worth of the individual was the cornerstone. Gradually, however the world shifted from a religious foundation to a secular and political one, and it was the state that guaranteed the principle of the right of religious freedom, the right to worship as one choose.

The romantics deepened and expanded these sensibilities, adding feeling itself as a value in itself, but it was really Darwin and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud who opened and closed the last Western century. In the wake of their thought, the foundations themselves were questioned: the natural goodness, the optimism, the independence of the individual. In fact human beings and human values were lifted from the center of creation to a peripheral space, and the non-rational forces moved to the center of the way the individual creates values. Darkness replaced the dawn. Conflict became permanent and not merely a stage in the process of becoming. Individuals and communities were seen as divided against themselves. Doubt replaced certitude. Power replaced peace. The individual was still the focus of forces from within and without, but now the individual was besieged, and often an outcast, expelled and exiled from home.

What began then as confidence in authority with the Greeks and the Hebrews has changed to doubting authority. What began with a confidence in reason has changed to a fear of the irrational. What began as a sense of unity with the universe has changed to a sense of alienation from the natural and the spiritual world. As we look around our modern terrain we seem to be living in the ruins of ancient beliefs, caught up in irreconcilable conflicts with no moral exemplars and no clearly defined responsibilities. Homeless ourselves. And yet, this is only a partial vision, for in fact, beyond the doubts of the present, what our ethical tradition has bequeathed us are some clear insights into some fundamental assumptions that support our Western ethical personality as well as some clear ethical convictions, which as we look at both, have become permanent presuppositions in the Western moral character.

Consequently, we must begin our inspection by acknowledging that there is a developing Western ethic which we may easily miss if we pay too much attention to special individuals and their differences, or if we attempt to ignore the Jewish-Christian tradition which, whatever one may think of it, has been a constant influence upon the ethic, including the philosophers, or finally if we become too preoccupied with contemporary political and moral problems. For there is an ethical tradition of the West that contains essential and enduring moral insights and convictions. But in order to glimpse the lineaments of these insights and convictions, it is important to step back and view the history of Western ethics as a whole, and it is then that we can notice six major assumptions that endured throughout.

1. In the first place, the major concern of the Western ethic has always been the human person in a human community. It has always focused its attention on what it means to be a person, or what it means to be becoming a person, and therefore one of its central concerns has always been what personal relations are and should be, and what social institutions are and do, and should be and should do. The most important materials of ethics are therefore found within the living experiences of the self and of groups, and ethical reflection and creation begins with such intimate personal experience. It begins with a sense of place, both temporal and physical. It begins in our homes and our sense of what home is and where we feel and have felt at home. It begins on the James River of each of our own lives.

2. With this focus upon the individual in community, there has always been an accompanying dual emphasis on individual rights, which historically is the ethic of goals, and on individual responsibilities, which historically is the ethic of motive or duty. Concurrent with this double emphasis is the accompanying sense of the equality of value of all persons and the sense that institutions are made for human beings.

3. A focus on these emphases has tended to produce ethics characterized: (a) by seeking: that is, by an intellectual curiosity and questioning; (b) by a focused concern on practical application of values, and (c) a significant emphasis on discipline: that is the use of reason to understand and to order behavior and emotions. Although it should be noted that as central as reason is in understanding what is happening to and in us, including what should happen, we neither receive nor live by the ethic of rationality.

4. In the fourth place there is the shared view that there is ethical truth, that in opposition to all ethical skepticism, irrationalism, and subjectivism there is the conviction that there are fundamental and real differences between moral good and evil, right and wrong. And that whatever an individual or a community may postulate as the ethical truth is always objective, a truth that is discovered in human creation.

5. However, this truth, as known is always a relative or relational truth. Moral truth is related to the structure of personal existence. Since personal existence is not a static structure but is ever in process, and since it is always rooted in changing historical and social and cultural situations the ethical truth will be related to the particular person in each particular culture. This means that during one=s own life time each individual must work out, more or less satisfactorily, their own ethical existence. Each individual is lead to the discovery of moral truths by acceptance of assumptions provided by the ethical community in which they live, as modified by individual experience and expressed through individual reflection. But the experience and reflection change over time.

6. This final emphasis upon the individual is the cornerstone of the Western ethic. Every person who lives experiences some ethical fulfillment, and has some aspirations and sense of responsibility. To comprehend what accounts for the fulfillment, to understand the basic origins of the aspirations and obligations would be to understand fundamental aspects of the moral truth. Thus, the ethical life of the self comes prior to and accompanies ethical thought and creation. We do not begin ethical reflection as we may begin mathematical reflection or scientific study, i.e., with little or no prior experience in the field, able to proceed by carefully paced steps from the simplest to the complex. No matter at what age a self-conscious moral reflection begins it begins not at the beginning but in the middle, in the midst of life with conflicting experiences, values, beliefs, and societies pressing upon us. This is the essential paradox of Western ethics: that the tongues of the dead are voiced in the language of the living, that though Alast year=s words belong to last year=s language/And next year=s words await another voice@, still the voice we are, the voice we are becoming is also the renewed, transfigured voice that others have known. For we are simultaneously creators and caretakers. We are the intersection of numerous borders and vast crossings.

Given these assumptions, and recognizing that the history of Western ethics is not one continuous success story nor even a continuous story, we can now state some of the clear convictions that have been developed in our Western tradition:

1. That every individual has the right to life and the right to the means to life.

2. That the direction of the ethical life is the self-realization of one=s own full potential.

3. That as ethical individuals we have a moral responsibility, a responsibility for our own actions.

4. That our political society exists to guarantee these rights and to ask us to account for our responsibilities.

5. And finally, that as human beings with kindness, dedication, courage and love we can make these rights and responsibilities real for all persons.

As we interrogate our memory, certainly, these are some of our basic Western ethical convictions. Still, the nagging question is: are they sufficient? Are they adequate to help us face the world that is opening before us? For prior to the twentieth century every major moral philosopher in Western history dealt in his or her theory with social and personal ethical problems, and generalizing from moral experience, created a normative theory. But increasingly in the modern world the Aethical communities@ have been dispersed or diffused and thus the moral philosopher has, in the chaos of the contemporary world, been left without the support of what is necessary as the starting point for a normative ethic. Now in the West, there is no adequate social base for the construction of an ethic. Today there is no compelling moral consensus. So, while every age has developed ethical principles appropriate to its own time, and while we too must develop new principles, still it is far from certain we will be successful, for today the practical situation is unprecedented. For this is, for those of us in the West, the last Western century and we must ask ourselves what it is that has made this century unique.

Reflection:

What can we say has happened to Western life in the twentieth century? What are the essential characteristics of our time, and what are the effects that these characteristics have had on modern life?

First, the organizational revolution. This is a revolution, a change in life that has silently transformed our society and our lives. It refers to the omnipresent fact that with our great organizational skill, we have developed organizations for everything and that there is scarcely anything that we can do without intricate organizations, from making love through getting an education to controlling a free enterprise system. This institutionalizing of our lives has a profound effect upon us; all the more important, perhaps, because we usually take our institutions for granted. But their power over us, I believe, can hardly be over estimated.

Along with this is the sense that the institutions of Western culture have become dysfunctional, no longer adequately meeting essential human needs. No matter whether the institutions were thought of as socially patterned ways or socially organized structures there has developed a widespread dissatisfaction and even despair with them: Ainstitutionalized racism@, foreign policy and the military, education, health, politics, sex and the family, entertainment and the news media, housing programs, religion, transportation, law enforcement, welfare. It is impossible to look at any institutionalized way that human beings have organized their lives and not find serious criticism and considerable reason for criticism. Nor is it important at the moment to inquire whether the considerable reason is sufficient reason. The important point is that to a great extent human beings do not feel that the institutions Afit@ their lives and needs resulting in despair, malaise and distraction. Second, the technological-electronic revolutions. We live among machines, and in machines, and even for machines. And we live with the mass media so intimately that the mass media lives in us. We live in a time of unparalleled capability of transmitting or transporting information, goods and persons throughout the world. And yet this immediacy, paradoxically, makes intimacy less likely, makes privacy more fragile and creates vast pockets of stress and alienation.

Third, we have lived through social catastrophe and social success. The catastrophe of twentieth century violence was unimaginable in the nineteenth century, and even today, incomprehensible. What is the meaning of this: that millions of young adults have been killed, stalked like animals, destroyed without thought; that women and old men and children in literally hundreds of cities of Europe and Asia and Africa and Latin America have, in our lifetimes, been carelessly killed; that millions of persons have been and still are refugees, in strange places, without homes and without hope? What is the meaning of this violence, these random acts of genocide and terrorism, these outbursts of ethnic conflicts and the rise of crime in our daily lives and communities? And what is the meaning of this: that simultaneously with these events, the West and parts of Asia have created an ongoing prosperity, indeed, a life of opulence, of such wealth and luxury and waste as the world has never seen before?

Fourth, we have witnessed expediential rises in population and vast shifts in residences. From the moon this movement must resemble a cancer--a vast march of cells across a living body. But this displacement of individuals whether by choice, or fear, or accident has seen the burgeoning growth of the cities, the decline of the rural areas and the spreading tentacles of the suburban streets. In 1900 for example the population of the world was 1.6 billion; in 2000, it will be 6.1 billion. In 1900 there were 16 cities with a population in excess of 1 million; in 2000 there will be nearly 150. This process can perhaps best be illustrated by noticing where our families live and how they live, for paradoxically, crowding persons together in cities actually tends to separate them from each other; and, surprisingly, suburbanizing them has the same effect. The resulting pressures that have been placed upon families have been immense and have, as often as not, crushed them.

Fifth, individuals have continued to give their greatest love to the lowest common denominator. Nationalism has been the twentieth century god, and the major violence of the century has been the direct consequence of the nation-state and of the individual=s loyalty to it. The incipient transnationalism, whether it be the European Common Market, the rise of economic unions like NAFTA, or the expansion of the United Nations is still not the dominant ethos. In addition is the proliferation in importance of the pluralistic societies contained within each nation. Group identities are formed along ethic, racial, ideological, sexual and religious lines and these strong ties make border crossings, whether in marriage or friendships, whether political or economic, difficult and often dangerous. Accompanying these multiple sources of identity have been the various social revolutions that have taken place in the West, for more often than not these have come about because a group of people who have felt themselves marginalized have banded together and asserted their rights. This is true of the movements in labor unions, of African-Americans, of the dispossessed, the immigrants, or the assertive rights on behalf of women or the sexual revolution.

Sixth has been the centralization of power. This refers to the fact that in times of crisis the control of life has been centered to the fullest possible extent allowed by the technology and the institutions. And following crises, the power centers strive to maintain their control.

Seventh, the thought of our time has exerted powerful influences in our lives. That thought is so varied, so vast but whether it is philosophical, theological, scientific, economic or political it seems to have had two prime characteristics: a tendency toward extremes and toward providing an esoteric salvation. It sometimes seems that persons in our time have not been able to believe anything unless they could believe it all the way, and believe that it provided the one sure way to salvation: the scientific method, pacifism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, fundamentalism, fascism. Attitudes toward these have been extreme, and their devotees have often held them out as the one sure hope for human kind.

Finally the most significant factor of the twentieth century has been the fact that there seem to be no new consensual moral norms being established. There seems to be a weakening in the values of vocation, in a sense of the importance of personal integrity, in the centrality of sexuality and personal relationships. There seems to be a retreat from the public arena to the private; fewer causes, no crusades. A diminution of will. And at the same time there seems to be a growing chasm between professed virtues and practices, leading to a greater confusion, conflict and malaise. Accompanying all this is a pervasive absence of a personal and inclusive cause that gives life significance, an absence of the feeling that it might be possible to create a sustaining set of ideas, values or beliefs that can help one understand and enjoy life. There is a fragmentation of will, a thwarting or wasting of talents, a stifling of creativity, and an eroding of sensitivity both in the moral and the aesthetic realms. But perhaps the greatest concern here is that life is increasingly thought of in terms of threats, in terms of problems, in terms of the lack of meaning.

Now, if we put these together--the organizational and technological revolutions, the social catastrophes and successes, the shifts in population and allegiances, the centralization of power and the blind faith of modern thought--we can begin to sketch the effects of these characteristics upon our lives.

1. First, there is a lack of community. A community of persons is a spiritual thing: it rests upon the worthwhileness of the goals of the persons in the community, it depends upon mutual respect and mutual trust; and it therefore is marked by an openness of communication. But these characteristics are largely lacking in our society. A contemporary individual does not act as though he or she believes the doctrines, so important in Western history, of Plato and Jesus that the ultimate forces at work in human life operate by persuasion and not by force. Whenever problems arise the tendency seems to be for individuals to want to win, to impose their views upon others rather than to cooperate, compromise and attempt to talk out their problems patiently together.

2. Second, with this lack of community there has been an increasing erosion of the human personality. This is true because personality and community exist together. This depersonalization has happened so quickly and so quietly that we may not be aware of how it has happened to us. But it is marked by such qualities as a denial of our responsibility and a tendency to blame other persons and other situations for what we have become. There is also a brutalization of life or sandpapering of our sensitivity; an unwillingness to engage in sharp self-criticism; a lovelessness, both toward the self and toward others.

3. Third, there exists in us conflict and confusion. The conflict of two hundred years ago did not lead to confusion because beneath the conflict there was an automatic, real harmony. The conflict of one hundred years ago, or fifty, did not lead to confusion because through the conflict we believed we were progressing, howsoever painful the progress might be, to a social utopia and psychological salvation. But the conflicts within ourselves and within our society have no such common beliefs in harmony or progress. This is particularly evident when we look, for example, at the status of women almost anywhere in the world.

4. Fourth, this lack of community, this loss of personality, this conflict and resultant confusion is all related to the absence of inclusive causes for which to live. This, indeed, is I think, the most significant thing that has happened to us: we have lost that living sense of a meaning in life, of a meaning that is a harmonizing and a motivating force in our lives; we have lost that living sense of the sacredness of common things.

5. Finally, there is a decreasing sense of self-direction, or a decreasing sense of the adventure and control of the self in all of its relations. This refers, obviously, to the self-adventure and self-control of personality, to the self=s adventure and control of personal relations and of society. It means also that for most persons there are no felt personal relations with what is ultimate and inescapable; and for many who are so minded the relations are artificial, insignificant, and irrelevant to the daily concerns of life.

These then are the tremors that have shaken the Western world in the twentieth century, creating simultaneously a sense of disorientation and creating a series of distractions. Living with the imminent threat of eviction from our own tradition, if not in fact homeless, these characteristics of our time and their effects have brought us a significant set of interlaced concerns that human beings have never had to face before, and simultaneously there is a double waved challenge coming to us from our own future.

Engagement:

We cannot escape our history. We cannot hide from the time in which we live, and we must not hide from what has happened and is happening to us. This means, obviously, that we cannot act as though we have not been deeply involved in the holocaust of the great wars, or partners in the great hatreds of our time; that we cannot escape technology or its influences; that we cannot return to a pre-twentieth century kind of society, or kind of family, or kind of nature. The way out is not in retreat or in sleep.

But more than this: I am convinced that none of the popular panaceas of the twentieth century can adequately reconstruct human life in the twenty-first. The scientific method, public education, socialism, world government, psychoanalysis: these are pleasant panaceas to play with, but none of them are adequate to make us fully human.

Positively, we can begin by recognizing that we have reached the end of an age: call it what you will--the end of the modern world, the end of the Protestant epoch, the end of the Christian era, the end of Western civilization, the birth of the postmodern world. The name is not as important as the fact that we have arrived at an end, we have reached the edge. And beyond us are uncharted seas and unmapped lands. If we believe that beyond us there is a promised land, it is certainly one that we cannot see and therefore like any real adventurer, we must live by trust and hope and not by sight. Living on the edge of time the past can be of some help, indeed, of indispensable help, but we must be wary of living by our past. In that way is certain failure.

But we can also begin by recognizing that the history of ethics is complex, confusing. This is partly true because the history has had various origins, at different places and in different social and personal contexts, and dealt with different problems. Yet, often these sources have used the same words, which in themselves have imprecise and changing meanings. So, our own ethic is often confused and complex, inheritors as we are. And now the situations in which we apply our values are equally complex, confusing and changing.

But as we scan the history of ethics we can notice that most discoveries of new ethical truths occur when an individual and/or a community resolves practical moral problems and when individuals creatively reach toward new principles and perspectives. Of course, the times of resolving practical moral problems and reaching toward new ethical truths are times of extraordinary conflict and usually, as viewed from within the time, intellectual ferment, and frequently the feeling of spiritual chaos. Such a time is certainly the twentieth century since the first World War. But we also notice that normally ethical groups do not conflict with each other, unless one tries to maintain itself as the only legitimate ethical perspective. Consequently, the major conflicts in Western ethics have not occurred between ethical communities but within the communities and a framework of common assumptions. Most of these ethical conflicts have therefore been resolved by more inclusive views or finer perceptions of individuals in later moral communities.

This brings us to the first challenge of the twenty-first century, the challenge to revise our own ethical beliefs. This challenge will come simultaneously in two waves, from within and from without. In the first place new surges of immigrants, new technologies, and new imaginative insights will continue to create within the Western tradition the kinds of tensions that we have observed before. At the same time the essential conflict between the values of Adam Smith and the values of John Locke will continue to exert pressure on the surface of all of our lives. The challenge between free enterprise and democratic ideals appears now only in the shadows, but increasingly as the distribution of wealth continues to separate us, the question will be put more bluntly: how can we resolve the very real conflicts between the basic values of an amoral self-interested free enterprise system which allows wealth to accumulate in the hands of a few, and the values of democratic institutions which are committed to principles of self-evident and inalienable rights equally shared by all? It is possible that this conflict cannot be turned into a dance of partners, and that one of these value systems will attempt to fully dominate the other. But the hope is, that with the collapse of communism having brought the question from the shadows, that creative individuals can find new unifying common commitments which can bond these two into a new creative marriage, for without this bond, the acrimony of the parents will most certainly continue to be manifested in the disrupted lives of their children.

But simultaneous with the attempt to resolve these internal tensions, there will be a more significant wave, and this is that for the first time Western ethics will have to confront not just challenges to particular beliefs or insights, but to the very pre-suppositions that underpin the entire set of Western beliefs. Because for the first time individuals, communities, and nations within the Western tradition will be confronting other traditions which have also for millennia been developing their own ethical insights, perspectives, principles and traditions. At first we will probably confront these traditions over particular issues, unaware perhaps that underlying these issues is a rich history and a fully developed ethic which does not correspond to our own. We will, perhaps, be further handicapped because as we deal with these new traditions we will not, at least at first, have at our disposal a history of the ethical tradition that we are confronting, and so there is likely to be greater misunderstanding and misapprehension, and we are likely, if we are not careful, to find ourselves in the position of trying to assert our own beliefs as the only legitimate beliefs. Reconciliation between whole systems is something that has never been attempted before, and we have no model to follow to guide and assist us.

In addition, from the insights of anthropology, we will be forced to recognize the inherent malleability of most beliefs, and of most systems of beliefs. Contrasting cultural conditions can produce a wide variety, and at times, almost diametrically opposed value systems. If this is true, then as we face new cultural beliefs we must face them with humility rather than disdain, with a listening ear rather than a rigid mind. But even if we are open to listening and to receiving, it still may be difficult to tolerate what we hear, much less to embrace it. One thing is clear, however, and that is that for Western ethics, the twentieth century is the last Western century. This set of dual waves, from within and from without will, like any storm, permanently alter the Western landscape. Standing on the beach facing this double tsunami, what can we hope for? What can we bring to this experience that will not only help us endure it, but assist us to make with it, new lives lived in a greater harmony in a larger world and with greater satisfactions? Facing all of these challenges, what can we do to become more fully human?

First, and overarching all, we must experience dignity in our own persons, we must have a firsthand acquaintance with human dignity. In the West, we have lived and fought on slogans: the dignity of man, the four freedoms, freedom and equality, justice and mercy, the importance of the individual. It is important that we experience these within ourselves, in our personal life, in our personal relations. But more specifically, what does this mean?

First, that we develop a sense of the significant, and a sensitivity to the significant. This means that we develop our ability to distinguish for ourselves and not at the dictation of friends or authorities, that we distinguish for ourselves between the first rate and the second rate, between the profound and the superficial, between the sincere and the hypocritical.

Second, it is essential that we recognize, understand and--in such manner as we are able--oppose the threats to human personality wherever those threats arise. This means, of course, an understanding of what is happening to human life in our world, an understanding that takes us beyond the front page of the newspaper or beyond a half an hour=s world news. It means an intellectual restlessness, alertness, hunger that is important enough and also a recognition, an understanding, an opposition to those demonic, destructive forces in human life and society, and most difficult of all, in the self. Accompanying this, there must be that sense of the sacred that, knowing no limits, can permeate all of life.

Third, there must be an active acceptance of others as others. This implies the recognition that others are selves whose experience of life is as important to them as ours is to us. It means too the understanding that we do not possess all the truth about life, that there are many possible solutions to our common problems, and that we can learn from diverse peoples. And the acceptance of others as others also suggests that when we war with them we do not embark on a holy crusade but with a sense of a tragedy that has engulfed us all. And perhaps, most difficult of all, this relation to others makes it essential that we accept their rejection of us, accepting it not with an inner rejection of them, not with bitterness, nor with furious pride but with the awareness that this may be, if we allow it, a means toward the purification of ourselves and the achievement of our society. Rejection, like difference of opinion, is not a defeat but an opportunity.

But acceptance also implies sympathy, although today we have no accurate word for that eighteenth century term Asympathy@ which was, for David Hume and Adam Smith, an essential way of knowing the other. For Hume and Smith sympathy was defined as one person=s experience of the other experiencing. It was not my experience of your experience where I remain myself looking upon and responding to you, but rather, occurred when I place myself in your situation and in an imaginative sense become you. I have your experience; yet without losing my Aself@. In a real sense and to some degree I have your pain, your joy, your perplexity, your insight. Such sympathy is therefore absolutely essential to my acceptance of the other. For if ever I am to know you as you, I must, in key respects, accept you as you are and are becoming, letting you be the person you essentially are. This acceptance of you is doubly necessary as a means to the knowledge of you. In such accepting there is also the participating in a community with you. And one of the fundamental problems in this regard is to find the right psychological distance from you and nearness to you, a distance that is always shifting.

For the knowledge of selves points to the fact that we discover the inner life, whether of others or the self, in much the same way we find the inner meanings of a work of art. If successful in achieving knowledge, we see a person in much the same ways as we see a painting; we listen to a person in much the same way as we listen to music; we observe a person in much the same way that we observe a play, an opera, a dance; we read a person like we read a book. In all of these aesthetic approaches we see, listen, observe, read and respond immediately with our feelings. Later we may ask questions and develop theories. These frequently seem to be, and sometimes are, exclusively about the work of art. But the most important questions have to do with whether we Aunderstood@ the work; and this is the question basically whether our feelings in responding to it were both justified and adequate.

Fourth, there is a need for self-criticism that goads to correction and further achievement. And, in particular, there is a need for some fair estimate of one=s self, that is, for a continuing Socratic inquiry regarding the self and its powers. Together with this, and harder to achieve, is that acceptance of failure when it occurs in such a manner that one becomes a stronger individual through the defeat.

Fifth, and closely related to this self-knowledge, acceptance and discovery is a sense of history. There is as great a need for a sense of our past, of belonging to the history that has entered our lives, for making history personal. This is a return to tradition, but not a traditionalism. It is the accurate recognition that much that is vital in our time and in us has come from our past. The simplest way to clarify this point, perhaps, is to say that we do not need to look at our past but with our past. We do not need to look at Socrates and Thucydides, at Isaiah and Paul, Francis of Assisi and Aquinas, at Machiavelli and Jefferson, but what we need to do is to stand where they stood and to look with them. We need to look at them with the Asympathy@ of David Hume and Adam Smith.

Sixth, this way of looking would lead I believe to an experimental spirit, to an acceptance of change which is one of the most powerful forces of our time. And this would occur not simply because we would recognize the changes of history but, more importantly, because we would experience the spirit in which many of the individuals of our past accepted change.

Seventh, is the discovery of a cause. Here, once more, living with others in our past can help us, for it will serve to remind us that most worthwhile causes are not handed to individuals so much as discovered or created by them. And that this discovery has usually occurred gradually, sometimes maturing slowly, through loyal living with other persons. Such loyal living has often helped individuals in the West to discover, in after days, a pattern that at the time they did not recognize.

In the first seven points I have focused a good deal on the past, when what should be obvious is that it is important now, in this new age, to take these same insights and ways of living with others and to face the immigrants and the homeless that are coming to our shores or are already living with us. Beyond all this, however, there are two final qualities that are essential: I will relate them briefly, but I believe that, except for the overarching experience of dignity, they are most important of all providing a motive force and a meaning for the remainder. These are the qualities of courage and love to perform and achieve with the self, and with others, all of these factors required of us.

The courage is of great significance, and it gradually becomes a daily requirement: in this new century to live with a sense of significance, accepting others as others, opposing the threats to personality, with self-criticism, and risking chance and change.

The love is of all kinds: Eros, philia, agape, charitas, for life is, or can become, a unity, only though the activating power of love, of all kinds. This love is our first real and last home, a river that connects what is inland to the sea, that brings the waves of immigrants, of persons or ideas or beliefs, and bids them welcome. And this exploration by love, with love, will inevitably reveal to us the deeper and necessary connections between knowing another and being known, and lead us to see the connection between all of these relationships and becoming a self. For if the knowledge of selves has to do with memory and reflection and engagement, then it has also to do, most simply, with truth and love. The ultimate norm and the basic drive to knowledge, as Plato so clearly affirmed, is erotic. It is also the love of the suffering servant and of the Christ on the cross. It is a love modulated by, transformed by the truth of the ways things are. It is the longing to know. Memory is such a longing for truth. But the memory and the longing and even the truth have their origin, as both Plato and Aristotle knew, in wonder. All knowledge begins in this wonder, such a wonder the self knows when it enters the presence of others, when it is present with itself, when it is aware of being known. The art of knowing persons begins here, in this wonder, moving toward a greater and greater unfolding of love.

heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always--

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

Endnotes: Conclusion