After a “hiatus” of eight weeks or so—a couple of which I owe to some physical difficulties of my own—this blog must begin with both an explanation and a caveat. After completing my World View posts back in late September, I was “wandering and wondering” a bit and when I told my wife that I was, she quickly offered, as usual, a simple solution: why not use some of the ideas that have been topics for discussion in my men’s group. Most of them are substantive, but one of the rules of the group is “what happens here, stays here.” That shared promise of confidentiality is one of the things that both energizes and bonds the group, but that agreement would not be violated if I used only my own contribution to the topic. And that is a pledge I will faithfully honor!

Looking over a couple of lists of suggested topics for discussion, there were several among the almost 50 of them that I highlighted as topics I might want to explore in a blog. This is the one I have chosen for this post, and one or more to follow: What are the major values or principles you live by? So, here we go!

I’m beginning with the term Principle, which can be used properly in a number of ways—for example, as a rule or code of conduct, e.g. the famous golden rule, but which I will leave to a later discussion of Values. There are also a multitude of scientific principles—e.g. in physics, the principle of relativity—as well as logical or axiomatic principles, such as Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction: “it isn’t possible that in exactly the same moment and place, it rains and does not rain.”^[8]. And then there are the familiar 7 Principles of the Constitution, including limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, and judicial review. All that said, for the purposes of these reflections, I will use principle as a kind of rule, belief, or idea that guides me, some basic truth that helps me with my life. While one could say that a person can have a lot of principles, I will zero in on just a few that constitute what I call “a ditch I’ll die in,” although that will require some clarification before I finish. Also notice in the title of this blog that these are principles I “seek” to live by—it’s an important qualifier!

Both my first principle and my prime value—and I’ll return to that—is the supreme importance of human personality. A human “person” is who I am.  As I noted in one of my previous World View blogs, I believe that human beings are, among other things, meaning-and-pattern-seeking creatures and that it is crucial that we make some “sense of things.” Part of my own attempt to do that is to honor this principle, this value, in my thoughts and my actions. That includes doing what I can to nurture and preserve the highest standards of human behavior, starting with my own, and doing whatever is in my power and my sphere of influence to make human personhood lift and enrich human society, rather than dividing and corrupting it. Here are some ways I have tried to do that, none of which I claim to have been able to do perfectly or consistently.

In my 20-year teaching career, especially in my philosophy and interdisciplinary courses, I tried to encourage my students to be conscious of their status as human persons with the unique ability not just to think, but to think about thinking. I wanted them to be aware of their capacity to be reflective, to wonder, to learn not just about facts, as important as they are, but what makes a fact a fact, and how it is related to a web of other facts that not only form the background of their own lives, but actually make their lives, and the world we live in, possible. No other creatures on earth have the ability to do these kinds of introspective and explorative thinking! So, as human persons, we are responsible for cultivating them, trying to understand them, being alert for ways of thinking yet to be discovered, and keeping them alive for those who will follow after us. I believed that it was important to affirm their thinking, their class participation, and their completed assignments, and even when I needed to correct them, redirect them, or have them start over, I tried never to demean them, or make them feel like failures. When I hear my wife talk about her assignments, class work, and conversations with students, I am keenly aware that my pedagogy was never as creative as hers. Still, I sought to help my students see the road ahead as an opportunity to learn more, to appropriate more, to “be” more of the persons they were capable of being. I also tried to be respectful and supportive of my faculty colleagues, to learn from them and to share with them insights and practices I had found helpful.

While my basic principle of the supreme importance of human personality remained the same, its practice changed in some important ways when I moved from teaching to administrative responsibilities as Chief Academic Officer for over 20 years at two Universities. I tried never to forget that my primary task was to enable faculty—and staff—to be focused, engaged, and innovative in their primary purpose of teaching and learning. It was also important, given my basic principle, to be helpful and respectful in my relationship with those who reported to me. Sometimes, of course, it was necessary to be “redirective”—that is, to say “No.” In my experience, hearing some people in positions of authority saying “No,” felt like hearing a door slam shut! I believed that there was more than one way to reject/deny a request, or a proposal, or a behavior without demeaning the other person. I always tried to be heard as though I simply needed to close one door while making other possibilities available by opening another door or two.

Even in my avocational career as a professional actor for over 40 years, the supreme importance of persons was alive and well. Without getting into too much details, the process of putting together a play for performance—especially in a summer repertory theatre where one is followed immediately by another—is a complicated and pressured undertaking: actors trying to figure out their characters, learn their lines and stage movements; costumers searching the “costume closet” and designing /creating what isn’t there; scene designers crafting a set for the physical environment of the play; lighting techs that hang, focus, and program the lighting system, and sound techs who test acoustics, mix and manipulate sound; others who handle tickets and the box office; and last, but hardly least, the director who is in charge of it all! Between the amount of work to be done and the “time crunch,” patience and tempers can be short! Nevertheless, I tried over the years to respect persons and the work done by virtually everyone just named, without which the production could never happen but who also were never exposed to the public eye. Finally, I also respected the character I played on stage, whether fictional or historic.  So, in order to make that character “come alive”, I asked myself, how did this person think? what did he think about? what most strongly touched his feelings? how did he relate to other people? what was characteristic about how he spoke and conversed?  Then, with the crucial help of talented directors, I tried to incorporate those unique characteristics into the “person I became” on stage.

Finally, after retiring five times and finally making it stick, I’ve tried to retain my primary respect for persons but I confess that it hasn’t always been easy. For some reason that’s now slipped my mind, I was thinking recently of the name, America, and then of the United States of America, and how glibly we say that. Once upon a time that was true, but United? Now? And what comprises a State? Land, territory, borders, of course. But more basically and importantly, Persons!! So, I’ll offer two comments related to my current attempts to respect and hold on to this principle.

On the one hand, the disorder I see around the world—including the breakdown of political respect in our own country, with the resulting literal threat to democracy itself—has made it more difficult for me to keep consistent faith with this primary principle! That’s reason enough, I guess, but perhaps it’s also my increasing lack of patience that seems to have come with aging, at least for me—or maybe I just need to find someplace to fix the blame for my occasional wavering. That said, all is not pessimistic!

My other offering begins with the fact that, in this country, we live in a capitalist system based, by definition, on seeking profit, and since goods and capital are limited, competition is inevitably at the core of the system. Competition means that there will always be winners and losers, even though effort can be put forth by both. So the question is, what happens to the “losers”—the desperately poor, the hungry, the homeless? Should capitalism be Darwinian in its approach—the losers, who can’t compete, are to be marginalized and die off? Or should capitalism have a “safety net” that rescues, feeds, “homes,” and offers training that can help them compete, at least sufficiently, in this capitalist society? It’s probably no surprise that I choose the latter approach and, fortunately, our country does provide various kinds of assistance—such as welfare and Medicaid, for example— but there are also “holes” in the safety net—lack of affordable housing, wages too low to meet necessities, etc. Since this is not an essay on how to fix the system, something I’m not qualified to do anyway, I’ll just point out the obvious, which is that the problems mentioned are too massive for one individual to “fix.” How, then, in the face of this issue, am I to honor my prime principle of the supreme value of human persons? 

One way is to support organizations that offer pathways to repair the “holes” in the safety net, to lobby the powers that be to adopt them, and to vote for candidates that embrace them. Another way that my wife and I can and do participate in addressing these issues is to contribute, as we are able, to organizations large enough and deeply committed enough to find ways to directly assist those persons in need—for example, Manna Food Bank in our area, a member of Feeding America, and Habitat for Humanity. The other path is to become associated with a local organization that seeks to help specifically those individuals in our community who are hungry and homeless. I do that by supporting and serving on the Board of Directors of Hands and Feet of Asheville, a local non-profit organization that hosts adult volunteers who serve with local agencies that directly feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. Please don’t hear any of this bragging—there are others who do far more! It’s just to say that I continue to hold this primary principle in my heart and mind and—even when I fail to live up to it—to honor it and seek to embody it.

Since, not for the first time, I have gone on longer than I intended, I’ll stop and finish this blog in a second post on two of my other principles before moving on to talk about a few of my most important values. I hope you’ll be willing to stay with me.