Battling with never

It might be due to my Jesuitic education, who always encouraged a balanced analysis when passing judgement on moral questions. It can be due to one of the first lessons I ever got in philosophy, which dealt with Plato's Allegory of the Cave, explaining that our impressions of the world are tainted by our own perception and judgement. One way or another, I have always had a hard time dealing with anything in absolute terms: I do not think that anything can be labeled as "the best ever", nor that anyone should promise "never to do that", nor that there should be an "absolute prohibition" for almost anything. Life can present you with so many different circumstances, and these circumstances can change back and forth so many times over the course of our lifetime, that it does not make sense to me to try to define absolute rules, and it is better to rely on a case by case judgment (even if it is a lot more work).

One of the main reasons for reaching different conclusions is the difference in perception. Just this afternoon Trevor came around asking "do you realize that you could be seeing the red color in a completely different way as I do and yet, because we call the same we would still be able to understand one another?". In this particular case we taught him (many years ago) that this color was red and this other green, and since none of as suffers from daltonism, we soon reached a common understanding on how to name colored objects. But the fact that we use the same word does not mean that we perceive it in the same way. Karen's father, for instance, loves to drink his coffee almost boiling hot and will quickly dismiss it as "too cold" at temperatures that I would not be able even to sip it. We have no problem agreeing if it is 40 C or 60 C, but his "too cold" is for me still "unbearably hot". And this difference in perception is bound to affect our judgment.

Photo: Hans Splinter

The other source of divergence is the preexisting knowledge or experience: people who have had a bad outcome in a certain situation in the past are going to be more skeptical about possible happy endings in the future than those without a past record, who in turn would be less optimistic than those who have succeeded in the past. That is why it is unfair to judge, for instance, someone else's fears because we do not know what kind of unpleasant memories they carry with them that prevent them from behaving in a more "usual" way.

These differences in evaluation lead, at least in my case, to a certain moral relativism: if the same actions can be deemed "good" by one person and, at the same time, "bad" by another one it is important to understand the motives for each of the judgements before I pass my own. Of course, there are many events which elicit very little debate, because they are considered almost universally good or bad, and the exceptions are also broadly acknowledged. But, other than that, I am open to debate.

I bring this back to you because, on occasion of a discussion over drug addictions that I had with Trevor for his Biology class, I remembered a podcast some months ago (sorry, I have not been able to pin point it), that discussed how the 12-step program proposed by Alcoholics Anonymous (and now followed by many other addiction/compulsion help groups) might be losing a lot of potential recoveries along the road because of its demand of total abstinence. One very salient case was a woman who discovered that her mother, who attended regularly her AA meetings, had been claiming more than ten months of sobriety while the daughter saw her occasional relapses. It is true that, for recovering addicts (and alcoholism is just another addiction), abstinence is obviously better than succumbing occasionally to temptation, but it is also true that admitting a relapse after a long period of abstinence can be disenfranchising enough to keep the addict from trying again. The shame of having "fallen" again that many would return to their previous full-blown addictive behavior rather than going back to the help group.

This is the reason why the current trends in recovery are much more focused in "harm reduction": going down from getting a daily high to a weekly high is not a recovery but it is nonetheless some progress. The same applies to drinking alcohol from reliable sources instead of "hunting for it" on the streets. It will take many additional steps to eradicate the addictive behavior, but they focus on trying to make headway week after week and not so much in the occasional setback (as long as they stay occasional and do not turn into a habit). But in the end we are all human, have better and worse days, and sometimes we manage to keep our promises and sometime we just do not.

In a famous quote from the 1980 American film "The Empire Strikes Back", Yoda, the Jedi master, tells his apprentice, Luke Skywalker: "Do. Or do not. There is no try". And, while I sympathize with the concept on the short term, my experience is that it is often impossible to predict if you will be able to keep your commitment in the future so it is probably more honest to say "I will try" than "I will do". And for me it is more important to be honest than to look great, so I rarely say "always" or "never". But that is just my point of view. How about you? Have a nice evening.