Image by paulidin via FlickrAs a young boy attending elementary P.S. 179 in Manhattan in the early 1950s, I remember learning the Palmer Method of cursive handwriting. And six decades hence I still recall my teacher's general admonition to our class: "Neatness counts!" It is remarkable how this early-childhood experience, with appropriate adjustments, adaptations and generalizations, has guided my activities — physical, intellectual and even emotional. "Neatness" evolved into the concepts of accuracy, clarity and rationality; and "counts" became the general concept of measurement.
In recent years, with the advent of pronounced socio-political polarization in our midst, my "neatness counts" mantra has become inadequate to the task set before us all — how to make sense of a world gone mad. Accuracy, clarity and rationality have been subsumed by torrents of mendacity, mudslinging and ubiquitous barking madness. And our scales and yardsticks of measurement have been replaced by the loaded dice of diluted authority (as represented by high profile Nobels awarded to lowlifes and blowhards), the universal clamor of would-be experts (broadcast via the internet), and the unbridled posturing by everyone with an ax to grind, which is to say just about everyone.
As I am slowly beginning to realize, the difficulty is no longer with the virtue of generalized "neatness" nor with the process of measuring. It has to do with our units of measure.
The well-established measures work up to a point. The objective is to find reason, hope and sensible guidance in the chaos of seven billion self-involved, mostly angry, and vastly ignorant automatons who have easy access to provocation, misinformation, and explosives. The distillation of reasonable guidance can only be accomplished via stages of elimination, having increasingly finer (and concomitantly more difficult) filtration of chaff.
Eventually we are left with an appropriate distillate of potentially useful guidance, albeit extremely difficult to discern because the final selection is fraught with dangerous misguidance as well. Enter the tie-breaking measure: a modicum of generosity of spirit.
If one is genuinely interested in comporting oneself in accordance with a personal set of ethical standards one must develop a keen sensitivity to that ephemeral generosity of spirit which illuminates the path of righteousness. It is difficult to define such a spirit, but there exist criteria that provide a forensic process. Beware "monolithicism"! Aside from God, The Obama, and Paul Krugman, nobody is omniscient. Even Albert Einstein failed in his efforts for grand unification.
Anyone who never grants another's point on any subject is bereft of generosity of spirit. Such slick, often articulate, brazen self-assurance, well lubricated with conceit and pomposity, must be shunned at all cost.
Post 1,537 Neatness and Generosity of Spirit Count
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