We live in a time of too much information and not enough attention. Yet the key to achieving the good life is a capacity to discern what is important and meaningful from what only appears to be so: to decode the moral signal from the mind-numbing noise of the digital age.
Morality today often appears under the guise of heroic choices. We are asked to save the earth or to end genocide and war forever. But I know perfectly well that I can’t accomplish such lofty goals. I may wish, out of a sense of humanity, to save the Ukrainians from their Russian invaders and end the slaughter in Gaza, yet I can do nothing about it beyond talk.
The same can be said about climate change, abortion and transgender rights, all the supposedly “moral issues” that torment our public debates. I can vote and even volunteer to work for candidates who are for or against, but I personally lack the power to do more than persuade.
These are political questions. They pertain to government policy rather than behavior. In a democracy, they are fair game—but they suck up all our time and energy on the web and are thus a distraction from the struggle for the moral life.
“Telescopic philanthropy” flatters our vanity with its call for heroic poses. Small gestures grow large with self-importance. I can, in my own eyes, become savior of the Earth by the simple act of purchasing a Prius.
Of course, it’s morally hollow. It’s noise: information from faraway places distracting and even confusing me about what is important to my life.
Morality is personal, and it’s all about action, not talk. I live in a small world of family, friends, work and community: That is my moral sphere, where my personal behavior has consequences for good or ill. Every day I add to one or the other. Every person I encounter I leave better or worse. My character becomes the sum of those days, those encounters. I can’t evade responsibility by, say, storming a campus building on behalf of a free Palestine.
The moral life is a burden and a struggle, in which vanity plays devil’s advocate. I may wish to appear awesome to my children, important to my fellow workers, handsome and charming to the women around me, a dominant force in the world—the ultimate winner. That way lies perdition. The moral life feels like a burden because it reorients the world away from the self: What matters is what others wish, what their vanities tell them.
Humility is the starting position in the moral sphere. Humility is reality—vanity is a lie. My wife, children and grandchildren are more important than I am. Those are the facts. Everything I do to ease their everyday cares therefore redounds to my credit, while any attempt to bend them to my needs leaves me a meaner, smaller, more debased person.
If I abandon my family to join a campaign to save the Earth, I have failed the test of my moral sphere. Prince Gautama, who broke with his family forever to seek spiritual enlightenment and became the Buddha, transgressed against morality for doing so, whatever his ultimate worth.
In the workplace, morality requires a difficult balance—humility toward those who rank below me but unvarnished honesty when dealing with the boss. Arrogance and servility are equally disgusting—two sides of the same human frailty.
I never burned with career ambition, but I believe the desire to get ahead is healthy and natural. The cost matters, however. A promotion and a bigger salary aren’t worth the sacrifice of my good character. Success and status won’t compensate for the neglect of my family.
The workplace has a supreme virtue: integrity. In this corner of my moral sphere, I must rise above fraud, deceit and exploitation. It is at the workplace that we are often led to temptation—money changes hands, men and women meet away from their spouses, power and status are fought over and parceled out.
Integrity means I remain whole. I won’t crack like a mirror and shatter into contradictory behaviors. I can’t be a good employee and also a sexual predator, or a good family man who cheats customers or steals from the company.
Community translates, in my mind, to the spot where I live, home to one of the great American virtues—neighborliness. If I see smoke coming from a neighbor’s window or a stranger prowling around a neighbor’s yard, I’ll feel the same sense of urgency as if it were my own home in peril. This may seem obvious to you, good reader, because you probably are American, but I have lingered in countries where neighbors, perceiving trouble, have looked the other way.
Some years back, during a terrible blizzard, my neighbor across the street somehow found a snowblower and cleared his driveway and the sidewalk in front of his house. It wasn’t easy. The mounds of snow endangered him and strained the machine—but nevertheless, as a matter of course, he next cleared the driveway of an elderly neighbor. And then, also without much thought, he cleared every driveway on the block, including mine.
Let that neighbor with the snowblower stand as an ideal for me to aspire to.
My moral sphere is a small world, a limited space. The necessary virtues aren’t complex: humility with my family, integrity at work, neighborliness in my community—add loyalty to friends, and one has the basic package.
If all this sounds puritanical, then I’ve failed to convey what is at stake. The small world is what matters because it’s the only place where you and I can matter. It’s all potentiality, all signal. The great joys and the sheer fun of life can only be had by success in this place.
The pursuit of happiness, Jefferson maintained, is identical to the practice of virtue. The practice of virtue, in turn, is possible only within my moral sphere. The rest is politics and posturing—noise from the great world beyond.
Of course, most of us are empathetic creatures. Our hearts break when we see images of children killed by violence in Israel or Gaza or starving in camps in South Sudan. Reading the unending laments that people in Cuba post on Facebook, I feel like I’m watching, helplessly, a modern Greek tragedy approaching its terrible conclusion.
But empathy should be applied to practical effect. So I wrench myself away from vast streams of information—ghastly dramas of death and destruction in places beyond my reach—and try to fix my attention on the effect of my actions, for good or evil, closer to home.
 | A guest post by
|