This is the principle virtue in Confucianism. It's translated as 'filial piety', but what it involves is obedience, care and devotion. I'd come across this before in various places - notably in Jeremy Lent's fascinating The Patterning Instinct and in The Great Courses series on the Meaning of Life led by Professor Jay Garfield. At the time, I think I found filial piety - especially the obedience part of it - rather unappealing. But for some reason my view's changed somewhat.
It came up in another Great Courses series, Moral Decision Making with Professor Clancy Martin, and Martin offered some nuance that I hadn't taken on board before. Obedience, he said, didn't mean that one couldn't counter or guide the parent or elder, but one does so with respect. Not blind obedience then. And not blind devotion, either. More an attitude of appropriate reverence, love and appreciation. And care suggests compassion, which always seems a virtue.
He said these values originally were directed at the king, emperor or state and became adapted to the family elder, and elders in general. They seem appropriate too in the case of teachers, leaders - maybe even good bosses. He suggested that as a whole, and specifically obedience, these virtues might seem antithetical to contemporary Western mores. There's much truth in that. Obedience is perhaps the most disvalued. Doesn't it run counter to concepts of equality? Nay, of egalitarianism!
Perhaps.
But that more nuanced concept of obedience - of doing what those who hold some position of experience or authority suggest (I chose this word advisedly over 'order') and of only countering such suggestions with good reason and in a tone of respect - seems like it could lead to a more smooth-running, efficient and peaceable society. This does not have to deny anyone rights, respect or independence. One could freely obey where obedience is reasonable. One still has course - and the right, or, rather, the duty - to consult one's reason, one's conscience and even one's strong preferences. And, let's assume too that in this well-ordered scenario, those with authority behave with respect to those they are in a position to direct. Let's assume they behave with reason and consider the strong preferences of their cohort. Both the senior nor the junior should be regarded as rational, feeling, thinking individuals. It's just that, at times, in certain circumstances, it makes sense for some to lead and others to follow. Nothing 'taken for granted'.
It wasn't obedience, though, that I wanted to explore. Nor care, actually, which is uncontroversial. I'm most interested in 'devotion'. This, like obedience, could appear old-fashioned and out of place in a modern family, in a modern society. Isn't devotion only for God? Or rock stars? this is where I had a flash of... oh... maybe longing... for a world in which devotion was reserved not for the imagined divine and/or the idolised celebrity but spread more generously and more widely.
Immanuel Kant wrote, 'Respect [or reverence, which I prefer] is consciousness of a worth which thwarts my self-love.' How beautiful is that? In every moment when we are in conversation with another, how wonderful if that was how we treated them?
And why not? Wonder is the sense that there is a mystery and a complexity which the subject cannot comprehend, cannot turn into a simple formula or a stated axiom. Isn't that precisely what the consciousness of the other always is? The other is always more than they can say, more than they can know, let alone more than I, the interlocutor, can ever hope to comprehend. Each person carries a universe of mystery with them. Each conversation is a conversation with the deep and limitless unknown.
I feel myself, with others, often assuming that all these things that I know, have read, have experienced, are completely unknown to them. In my head, I think, is all this richness of thought and memory and ideas that they can't have, that they don't have. This is true, of course, though perhaps humiliatingly less than I imagine when it comes to facts and knowledge. But it's the same the other way around - in their heads is a multiverse of which I am entirely and comprehensively ignorant. Which I can never do more than grasp at.
I feel myself often assuming that they are the sum total of what I know of them and what they are saying to me. While I know that I am so much more than they know me to be or than I say to them.
An attitude of devotion turns the tables. I do not have to devalue myself and my complexity, but I do have a moral duty (and I think, I really do think, it is a moral duty) to acknowledge the complexity and variety and richness of who they are. I can learn so much from them, whoever they are, if I approach them in this way. Approach them as the limited thing I think they are, and they are subsumed by my self-love.
This is more obviously the case with real elders, who have had more years to harvest experience and knowledge. One resents it when they point this out (I do when my father points it out), but that assertion of seniority is perhaps (is surely?) a reaction to a felt lack of respect. This does not mean that they are always right, these elders. Times change; mores change; new information and new standards of behaviour have to be taken into account. Yet still, unless they have gone through the world unthinking, unfeeling and unremembering, we let their accumulated wisdom die unheard at our possible peril.
Devotion that is 'just' action, that is pure performance, may soothe the elder's ego and smooth relations, but only devotion that is felt will reap benefits and allow for genuine connection and real education.
In the time we have, we should take time to learn the lessons time has taught.
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