A New Year, A New Model of Winning

 


I have just read this and I want to share it with all of you as it describes the promise of who we are as human beings trying to discover identities for ourselves.

 

A few years ago in the Seattle Special Olympics nine people assembled at the start line for the 100m dash. This was an unusual bunch as they were all suffering from mental or physical handicaps. At the sound of the starters gun they all surged forward except one boy who fell on the asphalt, rolled over a few times and started crying.

 

The other eight up ahead heard the crying and all looked back to see what is happening. Everyone of them turned and ran back to the young boy. A girl with Downs Syndrome bent down and (more…)

Principle

 


 

Principle — particularly moral principle — can never be a weather vane, spinning around this way and that with the shifting winds of expediency. Moral principle is a compass forever fixed and forever true.

 –Edward R. Lyman

 


 

Hannah Arendt Predicted Our Current Condition

 


 

 

Hannah ArendtWhen you judge people’s worth only by the results they produce you elevate people whose ends justify the means.

We no longer elevate people of character but people of ruthless results. We are abdicating our right to evaluate character or methods.

The exclusionary rule is a vestige of the character school of public morality. Dirty Harry is the blossom of the anything goes replacement.

Only the modern age’s conviction that man can know only what he makes, that his allegedly higher capacities depend upon making and that he therefore is primarily homo faber and not an animal rationale, brought forth the much older implications of violence inherent in all interpretations of the realm of human affairs as a sphere of making. (p. 228).

 


 

We are perhaps the first generation which has become fully aware of the murderous consequences inherent in a line of thought that forces one to admit that all means, provided that they are efficient, are permissible and justified to pursue something defined as an end…

…for to make a statement about ends that do not justify all means is to speak in paradoxes, the definition of an end being precisely the justification of the means and paradoxes always indicate perplexities, they do not solve them and hence are never convincing. As long as we believe that we deal with ends and means in the political realm, we shall not be able to prevent anybody’s using all means to pursue recognized ends. (p. 229).

Hannah Arendt, 1906-1975, in
The Human Condition
German-born American political scientist and philosopher

 


 

See also Gandhi on ends vs. means.