Macro and Micro in Ethics
For many years I assigned watching Schindler's List for my first of five three-hour classes in my lay school class on Christian ethics. Alternatively to watchng this 1993 award-winning movie, they could read a novel of the same name by Thomas Keneally. After the preliminary introductions and syllabus. during the second hour I would show clips of the movie and lead a discussion concerning it. I showed it primarily for one reason-- to discuss the "macro and micro in ethics."
By "macro and micro" I mean the aspects of morality that are lived out on a bigger stage and those that are lived out in personal life. This is well illustrated in the life and accomplishments of Oskar Schindler, Schindler was a German war profiteer who was responsible for saving more than 1,100 Jews from death in the Holocaust. At the same time he lived a very immoral personal life, being unfaithful to his wife with a mistress, and then not staying faithful to the mistress. Consequently Schindler's life juxtaposed being a paragon of virtue in helping the Jewish people, despite losing money in his industrial enterprise itself, with living a very loose life, particularly through drinking abusively and having many "suitors".
How is it someone can be very ethical in public life, while being highly immoral in private life? Obviously the person who lives out their faith and commitments in their life will do so in all aspects of their life. There will be a consistency between their life in the world and their life with home and family. But sometimes the public personna is either superficial and doesn't really reflect personal morality or is self-serving, only to aid a person's legacy. In the case of Schindler, I think it is his growing up with and mirroring a father who himself did not live a moral life, which probably led to this inconsistency between the public and private parts of his life.
An additional factor that leads to this lack of consistency is human sin. As Paul wrote in Romans 7 often "the good that we would like to do we cannot do, but we do the very opposite." Human beings may be able to live consistently ethically in the public life, but they will not be able to always do the right thing in private life (or maybe visa versa). Ultiimately although we set our goals toward living as God would have us live everywhere and always, we will not be able to fulfill this, and need God's forgiveness to start over again and again and again.
The march toward the 2016 presidency has already begun. We will see many examples of inconsistencies from all of the candidates, whatever their political party might be. There will be public moral gaffes and private failings that the general public will come to know. No one will be perfect, and the level of public scrutiny will make it seem that politicians are the worst, or only, ones who don't live out their ethics on both a macro and micro level. But can we ourselves say that we are always faithful to this goal? Perhaps we should consider the finger that points back to us as much as the finger pointing at others. Above all, let us be quick to admit our failings, Let us pray: "I act out my beliefs; help thou my sinful actions and unbelief."
Comments