Thoughts Without Terminus
On Integrity, Being Humane, Loving, and Being Interesting
On Integrity
Some basic concepts of life hide in places we least expect them. Like integrity, for instance. Ask anyone around you what integrity is and you will get something closer to honesty. That is, meaning what you say and saying what you mean. However, merely staring at the word integrity, you see the concept hiding right there on the surface: to have integrity is to be integrated; to stand whole and unfractured — as you see of course in “integers” and “fractions.” To be whole, to be one — a unity and unbroken.
You can have honesty without integrity. But you cannot have integrity without honesty. To be honest is simply to say what you mean, or what is true. It often requires public-facing; that is, someone is usually on the other side of that which you are asked to say. But integrity is something more personal and intimate; something hidden away from the public’s view. It is best assessed by the things that are done in secret rather than those in the open. As such, a man can be divided; to have multiple faces as the various crowd demands. But wise men generally agree that the man you are when no one is watching is who you are. And on the occasion that the man in secret and the man in public are the same man, we can say he is a man of integrity. As the poet Peter Dale Wimbrow says:
When you get what you want in your struggle for self And the world makes you king for a day Just go to the mirror and look at yourself And see what that man has to say.
— Man In The Glass
On Being Humane
Now, integrity is part of what we call a man’s character. And the test of character is how you treat people you don't know and don't need. When there is no gain involved. When there is no profit to an act. And so goes the maxim that a man who needing to cut a rope, using a pair of scissors, shows what the scissors are for. But a man who merely studies the scissors for its own sake shows the kind of man that he is.
Which now makes me think curiously of the laboratory ethic of humane killing — of “sacrificing” animals quickly and painlessly in your experiment.
Why be humane? Well, because like the man who studies the scissors even when he does not need for them, the killing in and of itself bears no profit; you can do it and be done with it without losing anything in your experiment afterwards. The policy to perform this killing humanely is then a reflection of man rather than that of the animal.
Humane killing is also a test of character, and we might say of integrity. Of character, in the sense that you can assess a man’s heart by the way he treats helpless animals. And of integrity in that as policy which attracts penalties, a man who knows he can get away with inhumane killing, but still decides to do the humane thing, can be considered as having integrity — because he is the same man in the presence and absence of punishment. A man without integrity might perform the cruel thing. And may never be caught nor penalised for it. (But audienceless vices are not without their punishment: the degradation of the soul;
For it isn’t your father, or mother, or wife Whose judgment upon you must pass The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life Is the one staring back from the glass. —Same poet and poem.)
Why humane? Because the hamster, if cruelly treated by the scientist, cannot plead his case in court. He has no means of justice — justice is a human concept. It may shriek for survival. But a weak hamster can hardly escape the hands of a mighty white lab coat man. Have you ever seen a boy torture a frog? The frog simply surrenders to its fate. It can provide no case; although we might feel some sympathy for it; its family cannot storm the presidential palace or the senate. Its only voice comes in the form of other humans who choose to speak for it: just as vegetarians legislate rational human passions on behalf of animals since animal passions are circumscribed — per Scruton, “they feel no indignation, but only rage…no remorse, only fear of the whip…they are incapable of the thoughts on which the higher feelings depend.” The cruel treatment meted out by the cruel man says nothing of the animal.
However, when we look at the malicious torturer we see nothing but a cruel sadist with the heart of Sauron — which is no heart at all. It is then clear why we call this thing humane: the act, of which there is no profit, like the man who doesn’t need the scissors but simply studies it, reflects primarily, all humans. And secondarily —and particularly, the kind of man he is.
Now this is not to say that the person who performs the humane killing looks inward upon his humane act in an auto-voyeuristic manner; fellating and congratulating himself on how humane he is. Rather he is, like the man who studies the scissors for its own sake, humane toward the hamster or frog out of compassion for its condition. That is, he pours out of the well of compassion that he has dug in his person on the pitiable animal in performing the inevitable act of killing it. This —pouring out of the wealth of your person— I believe, is what constitutes virtue.
On Love
And love too. It is what constitutes love too. And this oft needs be said, for the wrong mindset runs rampant in the world that love is transactional; something agitated by an act or object. That the streams of love which sit deep within me must sit silently until the one who ought to be the object of my affection comes to stir it and cause a turbulence like the angel and the pool of Bethesda before I can give love. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Summarily, love is yours to give rather than someone else’s to take. That is, it stands at the feet of the throne of your will. In other words, you can decide to love. Of which really, is the only true way of doing so.
To recall our test of character: it is how you treat people you don't know and don't need. It is in how you offer kindness to people who bring you no profit. Who, if the occasion is right, you might forget them as soon as the deed is done. And treating people well who cannot repay us is the way we show how to love. As I elucidated in Finding The Beauty In Ordinary Things, “It is as if without burdens, we will cease to learn how to love. We learn to love by carrying the burdens of those who cannot immediately turn around and carry our burdens as well. To reduce all burden-bearing to a transaction is to lose our authority on love and designate our entire humanity as a commercial venture.”
If love is a skill, we exercise our limbs at it when we do good to those who cannot repay us. To quote Jesus: And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you?
Love is yours to give. Always.
On Being Interesting
Like having integrity; being humane; and being loving, being interesting is bound up in a person’s well. Something that is theirs to give.
Now if you are wondering if you are an interesting person, simply ask yourself this question: do you need specific situations, conditions, and environments to be interesting? If you answer yes, you are likely not an interesting person. If it takes someone else —even worse, specific persons— to mine interestingness out of you, you are not an interesting person. For an interesting person is one who does not need to be excavated to find the gems of his interestingness.
Do not despair. And don’t cast yourself down yet. For we all have the potential to be interesting people. Nonetheless, being interesting is a surface matter; a matter of both manners and appearance. It is not thousands of feet under to be explored by mining and archaeological teams of friends and psychologists who have the skill of mining interestingness out of people. If you must be plucked before you can sing, tell yourself you have the potential to be an interesting person. But you are not yet him. You will get there.
A man whose interestingness depends solely on his company is still divided, thus lacking integralness in that department. If you are interesting today, but not tomorrow, but you are the day after next, yet two days later we cannot find that lively guy, we can be sure that you are fractured somehow and you might need to find your way to the therapist for some modern-day confession.
However, the people we call “the life of the party” are always interesting in season and out of season. We call them so because —and only because— they are the ones who, breaking like a palette, spill colours on the party. In other words, interestingness, like love, is theirs to give and not others to take. The Life of the Party is the life of the party because, like a turtle, he carries his shell wherever he goes. Such that if he finds himself in the greyest doldrums of social spaces, he can provide himself at least, and maybe others with him, a modicum of spice and life of the party. In fact, you know that the life has gone out of ‘The Life of The Party’ when nothing can excite him. Rightly, you diagnose this as an anomaly to his being, almost like an illness and you will wish to nurse him back to health. But that is only because his normal state is the disposition of being interesting.
Now here is the most interesting thing of all: I wrote about being interesting close to three years ago. Read my My Fascinating Finds: Interesting People.
Until next time reader, thank you for reading.
And here is your meme:
