What 85 Years Have Taught Me
Don't worry. I'm not one of those octogenarians who think that age bestows wisdom on all of us. Nor do I think I have all the answers. In fact, the more I've aged, the more uncertain I've become regarding many things. But all those years have taught me some things, and this seems like as good as time as any to share them with readers.
Since we are all unique individuals—e.g., some young, some old; some hes, some shes, and some theys; some brown, some black, some yellow, some white, and some mixed—what I have to say will have more meaning to some than others. That’s fine. One of the things I’ve admired most about the LA Progressive (LAP) and Hollywood Progressive (HP) is that although I’ve contributed to them for more than a dozen years, I’ve always found those in charge—Sharon Kyle, Dick Price, and Ed Rampell—to be open-minded and tolerant toward a wide variety of progressive views—really wide.
But back to what I’ve learned. Religion and God seem like a good place to start—and I hope readers will tolerate my quotes from and links to some of my earlier articles. No use for lengthy repetition when those interested in more can simply click a link, and those not can just ignore.
Like most of you readers, I find it natural to wonder if there is a God, and if so, what does he/she/they/it have in mind for me when I die. In a year-old LAP essay, "Thoughts about Death and Faith: A Pragmatic Approach," just a few months after the death of my wife, Nancy, of 58 years, I spelled out my most recent thinking.
Having been raised Catholic, including over 20 years of Catholic education, and later having briefly taught [at a university] comparative religions, I am more familiar than most people with religious ideas. Ditto, for philosophers’ thinking about religion. . . .
But now, after decades of reading and thinking about previous theologians’ and philosophers’ ideas about God, all I can say is “the jury is still out.” Whether a God—however we might define he, she, or it—exists or not, no one can say for sure. We can believe or hope there is a God, but that’s all we can do. In spite of thousands of years of religious and philosophic inquiry, that’s all we got. No matter how intense one’s faith or hope is, if there is no God, believing or hoping will not create one. Conversely, no matter how ardently one insists that there is no God, such insistence will mean nothing if one does actually exist.
Several months before this essay, I wrote another for HP entitled “Why I’m an Agnostic But Still Value Religion.” In that piece I indicated that I valued religion and religious people and their views if they were tolerant and non-dogmatic.
In various essays I have also indicated a belief that our values are extremely important and generally agree with U. S. neuropsychologist and Nobel laureate Roger Sperry, who once stated, “Human value priorities…stand out as the most strategically powerful causal control now shaping world events. More than any other causal system with which science now concerns itself, it is variables in human value systems that will determine the future.” In his The Audacity of Hope (2006), Barack Obama (then still a senator) applied this type thinking to politics when he wrote that the question of values should be at “the heart of our politics.”
Thinking values are so important naturally leads to the question, “Which ones do you think are most important?’ During the last dozen years or so I have often written on values, from a 2010 LAP essay on “Health Care Reform and Liberal Values” to my most recent HP review of Hulu's "The Good Mothers." In the 2010 piece I stated that “the chief values I associate with liberalism are compassion (or empathy), tolerance, pluralism, and rationality.”
For many years I also wrote for the Wisdom Page until it ceased to post any new essays. My first piece there focusing on values was in 2010’s “Goals, Values, and Wisdom: Unsolicited Advice to Young College Students.” In it I expressed my preference for “wisdom-associated values such as empathy, truth, honesty, justice, cooperation, peace, compassion, universal well-being, creativity, and comprehensive knowledge.” I also agreed with Robert Sternberg, who wrote that “people are wise to the extent that they use their intelligence to seek a common good.”
“Love: The Greatest Wisdom Virtue” appeared next in 2013. The mere title suggested that by then I had decided that love was the chief value I should pursue. 2013 was also the year that I first suspected that Nancy had Alzheimer’s (it was confirmed the following year), and I knew that to help her best I would need all the love I could muster.
Having been raised Catholic, I knew from early on that love (in the way St. Paul described it) was important. For as I quoted him,“Love is patient, love is kind....it is not self-seeking....It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” And in another passage, “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”
And several centuries later did not St. Augustine write, “Love and Do What You Will”? Although easily misinterpreted, these words now (in 2013 at age 75) struck me as they never had before. Facing the prospect of Nancy’s Alzheimer’s, I knew that love was the key value I would have to stress for the rest of her life. Realizing that because, like everyone else, I was limited by human frailty and would never be 100 percent loving, Augustine’s words still seemed to me the simple key I needed to live as successfully as possible in the years ahead.
By 2013 I was also fortunate to have discovered the wisdom of Dorothy Day, that great helper of the poor, whom the Catholic Church was still considering for sainthood. And so in my Wisdom-page essay on love that year I quoted her wise words on love: “If we could only learn that the only important thing is love, and that we will be judged on love—to keep on loving, and showing that love, and expressing that love, over and over, whether we feel it or not, seventy times seven, to mothers-in-law, to husbands, to children—and to be oblivious of insult, or hurt, or injury—not to see them, not to hear them....not judge, not do anything, but love, love, love.”
What the words on love of Sts. Paul and Augustine and Dorothy Day all had in common was that they reflected an active view of loving. They were concerned with the virtue of love, not the more passive act of being loved as longed for by many in romantic relationships. In his poem “The More Loving One,” W. H. Auden, who was a homosexual, wrote, “If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me.” Like Auden, whom she knew, Day valued romantic love, but they both thought that the active virtue of loving, caring primarily for the good of the loved one, was more important.
I understand our deep human desire to be loved, and I was unbelievably lucky to be loved for six decades by such a good woman as Nancy. And, although some might think it illusory, I still feel her love for me. But in my year-plus of being a widower, I have missed her everyday love—even when we lived in her Alzheimer’s-restricted world. But at this stage of my life, it does not seem wise to me to invest much effort to seek another woman who will love me. No, try to live by your values and goals is my advice to myself, and let being loved or admired take care of itself. I think the Taoist have it right: (To put it very simply) “go with the flow” or as Doris Day once sang, “Que sera, sera / Whatever will be, will be / The future's not ours to see.”
In 2015, the Wisdom Page posted my five-page essay “Wisdom and Humility.” Of course, that virtue was also one that was stressed in my Catholic education. The essay quoted one of my favorite religious thinkers, the Catholic monk Thomas Merton. In writing on the “root of war,” he alluded to a lack of humility and thus tolerance when he observed that “in our refusal to accept the partially good intentions of others and work with them....we are unconsciously proclaiming our own malice, our own intolerance.” Today with our polarized nation and Congress, the following words I wrote then seem truer than ever: “This lack of tolerance has hindered effective compromises and working for the common good, which should be the primary aim of politicians such as our members of Congress.”
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I ended that essay with the following paragraph: “In conclusion, although love may be the greatest of the wisdom virtues, a sense of humility underlies and heightens, not only love, but also many of the others. Despite the fact that humility often seems in short supply in our Internet world of countless opinions and opinionators, most of the great religions of the world stress its importance—though some believers seem more dogmatic than humble. And non-believers like cosmologist (and agnostic) Carl Sagan can also emphasize the importance of humility, as he does when he states that the vastness and complexity of our universe are a ‘profound sermon on humility.’”
The following year, 2016, my “Wisdom-Directed Empathy in Politics and Everyday Life” appeared on the Wisdom Page. I began by defining empathy: “[It] is a tool for understanding the way another person thinks, feels or perceives. It enables us to comprehend another’s mindset, driving emotions or outlook, without requiring us to share the other’s thoughts, feelings and perceptions, or, indeed, approve of them. An empathetic approach involves the assimilation of diverse information, including social, historical and psychological details, and a conscious effort to see the world through that person’s eyes.”
That essay also stated that “empathy is necessary for us fully to exercise love toward others,” and it made the case for it being one of the most important values we should hold. It cited many important figures, past and present, who stressed it. For example, the Progressive Jane Addams, who in 1889 established Chicago’s Hull House to aid the poor, and Dorothy Day. About the latter, one scholar wrote of her “remarkable empathetic manner,” her “intense and enduring feeling for others,” and that her “feeling of oneness with others....may be the key to understanding and assessing her contribution to our understanding of the moral life.”
One present political figure cited was Barack Obama, who in his The Audacity of Hope wrote that empathy was “at the heart of my moral code, and it is how I understand the Golden Rule—not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes.”
On other occasions, there were additional values that I stressed. Truth, for example, as in my 2020 essay, “In This Election Year We Historians Need to Insist on Truth-telling.”
But wisdom is not only about having important positive values, it also is about prioritizing them well. Consider, for example, the folly of people ranking climate change outside the top ten priorities they would like governments to address. I recognize, however, as I did in my 2019 LAP essay "A Tough Progressive Balancing Act: Passion, Tolerance, and Compromise," that prioritizing well is often difficult.
Thus, my 85 years have taught me the importance of holding certain values and working at turning them into virtues. But one of those values, as I quoted in the essay on humility, also teaches us not to take ourselves too seriously. As the famed U.S. theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote “People with a sense of humor do not take themselves too seriously....All of us ought to be ready to laugh at ourselves because all of us are a little funny in our foibles, conceits and pretensions.”
One final essay that indicates what I’ve learned over many decades is my “Wisdom, Death, and the Transcendental: Beauty, Nature, the Arts, and Love” (c. 2014). The essay begins by relating how the great writer Leo Tolstoy, then still middle-aged, was so troubled by thoughts of death that (ironically) he seriously considered suicide. A few paragraphs later it asks, “If such thoughts can come to someone like Tolstoy with all his talents, wealth, health, fame, and devoted family, what hope is there for us less fortunate humans?”
For an answer I suggested self-transcendence and quoted various writers regarding it. One not quoted then, but who should have been, was Ernest Becker, whose The Denial of Death (1973) had won a Pulitzer Prize. In his book he wrote of “heroic transcendence, victory over evil for mankind as a whole, for unborn generations, consecration of one’s existence to higher meanings—these motives are just as vital and they are what give the human animal his nobility.”
This thought was similar to one I have more often quoted in the last decade, Robert Peck’s suggestion that we “live so generously and unselfishly that the prospect of personal death—the night of the ego, it might be called—looks and feels less important than the secure knowledge that one has built for a broader, longer future than any one ego ever could encompass. Through children, through contributions to the culture, through friendships— these are ways in which human beings can achieve enduring significance for their actions which goes beyond the limit of their own skins and their own lives.”
Following the consideration of what many others thought about self-transcendence, I recognized that because we are unique individuals there are many different ways it can be experienced. But for me it has come primarily from three sources: nature, the arts, and love, all of which have produced most of the beauty in my life.
In regard to the arts, the essay indicates how music, the visual arts, and literature, especially poetry, have often lifted me above more ego-driven cares. In the section on love, St. Paul and Dorothy Day, who I’ve already mentioned, are quoted, but also other favorites like Wendell Berry.
For example these quotes from a few of his novels. “Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.” “We must take love to the limit of time, because time cannot limit it. A life cannot limit it.” “The room of love is love that holds us all, and it is not ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back.”
A writer of poetry and essays, as well as fiction, In “Health is Membership” Berry comments that “in the face of illness, the threat of death, and death itself, it [love] insists unabashedly on its own presence, understanding by its persistence through defeat that it is superior to whatever happens.”
Although I did not mention my wife, Nancy, in this section, in a 2014 HP essay, “Reflections on Love and a Long Marriage,” I alluded to her when I wrote, “Love in all its magnificent varieties is the greatest thing in existence, and for a half century I have had someone in my life whom it is easy to love.”
My 85 years have also molded my views on other subjects like the importance of the humanities and arts in education, on war and peace, on the environment, on the blessings of ethnic diversity, etc., but these views flow from the values I have discussed. There is no guarantee that those I have chosen or the way I have applied them is the best possible, but all we fallible human beings can do is contribute to the globe’s ongoing dialogue and hope our ideas do more good than harm.
The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the Hollywood Progressive.
