The Wise Build on Rock
Why tackling individual moral accounting is foundational for systemic change
I am no longer a Christian, but I spent decades in Sunday School, both as student and teacher. And from years of engaging with certain material over and over, it gets burned into your brain.
The Flood. The wandering in the wilderness. The fall of Israel and the Babylonian exile. Paul on the Road to Damascus. And last but not least, the Parables told by Jesus.
The Good Samaritan. The Good Shepard. The Parable of the Sower. Jesus gave the first TED Talks. Who am I to try to improve upon the original?
(An editor would’ve had all this preamble taken out, but I for one like my digressions, and this is MY Substack, so I do what I want)
So I shamelessly steal one of the classics. The Parable of the Wise and the Foolish Builders. For those that don’t know it:
New Living Translation
24 “Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. 25 Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won’t collapse because it is built on bedrock. 26 But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn’t obey it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand. 27 When the rains and floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash.”
I’m not repurposing this passage to say I’m wise like Jesus. I’m fully in the Socratic estimation of myself and aware that I know nothing. But the parable wasn’t usually used in Sunday School as a strict “you oughta listen to Jesus” lesson. That was always implied. Instead, it was used for any lesson that required an example of foundation.
Also, Jesus called his disciple Simon “Peter”, which translates to “rock”. In the bible this is describing Peter as “the rock on which Jesus’s church was built”, but I prefer the Christopher Moore joke in his book Lamb that it was originally Simon “dumb as a rock” Peter. But I digress. This is unimportant to the point of this essay, just a fun aside.
Now to the point. I have been, over the course of the first handful of essays on the Substack, been laying out my concepts for an individual moral accounting. And while I’ve gestured towards larger systemic moral issues, climate change, the unhoused, I have not really addressed those larger problems from the perspective of my Ledger Ethics.
Which leads to obvious criticisms.
“This is just virtue ethics with a spreadsheet and does nothing to address the real problems in society.”
“You can’t expect individuals to take moral responsibility for shared problems like systemic racism and income inequality.”
To those criticisms I say, “Fair points. I agree, no one person can or even should take responsibility for the vast complex systems that truly determine much of our lives.”
So if I agree, then why have I been focusing on small acts of kindness while people are being disappeared off the street and a for profit prison system leverages systemic prejudice to keep slavery alive in the 21st century?
Because, like our ole buddy JC taught, if you are going to build something, it is better to build on a foundation of rock than sand.
You can have the perfect policy solution, the ideal legal framework, the magic bullet to solve a previously intractable problem. But none of that matters if the ground beneath your feet can shift in a storm. And the foundation we build on is our shared commitment to empathy. It is the agreement that we have a responsibility to one another.
You can’t build a better immigration system if you think refugees are “invaders poisoning the blood of our country and eating the dogs and cats”. You can’t get buy in for a universal healthcare system if you think some of the recipients of that care are “undeserving” and committing “waste, fraud, and abuse”.
Present all the solutions you want, but when the storm comes, in the form of propaganda that benefits billionaires or social media meddling to muddle the message, the sand gets swept from under your feet and even the most well-constructed houses collapse.
I believe that Ledger Ethics and Architectural Humanism does scale up to give us guidance in tackling societal, nay civilizational problems. But we can’t start to build solutions unless we know we are building them on rock, not sand.
We live in a world where it is all too easy to not see others as humans. To not believe that they have the same hopes, dreams, and fears that we do. Social media networks profit from this. So too do those who benefit from keeping things just the way they are.
Before building solutions, we have to build on a solid foundation. And the first step is witnessing one another as people. And having realistic expectations for them, you know, because sometimes people suck.
It takes courage to do witness others, to take responsibility for your impact on them. And strength. These are traits that don’t develop overnight, or because you want them to be there. They take practice.
This is why I am laying my ideas out on the foundation of individual empathy. This is why I am framing the house with “you owe me nothing, I owe you everything.” That idea cannot stand if people don’t believe the “You” in “you owe me nothing, I owe you everything” excludes the underserving “others”.
Our problems are societal in scale and require proportional response. But we have let the bonds that tie us together break to the point that a rock to build on has been eroded into sand. Therefore, we need new rock.
Empathy. That’s where we start building the foundation. It begins within each of us, and from there we build a better world.
Together.
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