I’d like to think that my way of being in the world is based on careful, well thought out principles of how to have a happy, productive life. I’d like to think that, but I suspect that my mountain of morals is resting on a foundation of aphorisms, jokes and parental cautions.
Take my dad, for example, a brilliant, sensitive man. I’ve tried to live by his life examples, but I can’t recall him giving me any direct instruction on a life worth living.
But if Dad’s advice was limited, there were a slew of adages for me to consider, many even useful. “A penny saved is a penny earned;” “A stitch in time saves nine;” “A fool and his money are soon parted.” My new favorite (from Albert Einstein no less) would have helped me be a better teacher: “If you judge a fish by how well it can climb trees it will spend its whole life thinking it is stupid.”
I am sure you can add dozens, maybe hundreds of similar examples of homey wisdom to the mix. I suspect that many of our deeply believed life lessons come from such unexamined adages.
But some sayings carry more danger than wisdom. When I was a boy “An eye for an eye” was not followed with the more modern “makes the whole world blind.” Instead it was endlessly repeated from the Old Testament to the news front pages. How much resentment has been channeled into those five words! These five words show us the roots of much of the world’s pain, from the 30 years of war in North Ireland to the cauldron of ethnic and religious hatreds that is the Middle East.
And then we have: “It’s a dog eat dog world.” How many times have you heard that one? Enough surely to have it sink into your pores. What an insidious and unexamined adage. If we gave it any thought then instead of “Be a man, my son!” we might hear, “Be a dog!” And if you are going to be a dog, be a big one with sharp teeth. Is that really what we want to teach our children?
But we do. Endlessly. That is the problem with these sound bites of wisdom. They fill our minds like a parade of bumper stickers. They are woven so deeply into our culture that they become unexamined verities. The problem with unexamined truths is that they are unexamined. Had any of this occurred to me 50 years ago I might have been able to take each one out of the closet, look it over, and toss out the hateful ones.
But no. I’ve blundered along with each pithy claim to wisdom buried under my skin only to erupt years later as a mild rash or a nasty boil.
Well it hasn’t been too bad for me, although I wish I were not such a slow learner. I grew up in the relatively safe world of the 1940s and 50s. But my grandsons are growing up in a wildly more dangerous world than my Brooklyn. They will need more than these hackneyed old saws.
It may be that our world views are shaped by aphorisms because that is how our brains are wired. We quickly attach to pithy saying and witty memes. If so, I’ve got a few new ones that I will be happy to pass on to my boys: Black Lives Matter, We Believe in Science, Love is Love, No Means No, Women’s Rights are Human Rights.
And definitely: Boys and Men DO Cry.
Alan Lipp lives in South Deerfield.