Love your neighbor as your neighbor loves you?

Jesus said that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. I think it is funny when Freud thinks this commandment should state, “love your neighbor as your neighbor loves you.” Perhaps the fundamental precept of loving your neighbor would be easier to accept if it was a universal doctrine of life. That everybody treated everybody with some measure of love and respect. However, what if I love my neighbor and my neighbor hates me, how does my love for him show any benefit?

I do think that loving your neighbor (or your wife, or kids, etc) has a lot to do with who we are as people… on our ability to be self-aware. Not simply aware of who we are, but to contain a willingness to be that with other people. It is hard to be giving, compassionate or patient if I struggle with how someone may perceive that. Our relationships, and our ability to truly be ourselves (and love) others, is a process of maturity. How I relate to people is a direct result of my willingness to be who I am. I would agree with C. S. Lewis in that the more I understand myself (all of me), the better I am able to give myself to others (love them).

I do think it is tough to love someone who doesn’t love you back, or who hates you back. But I think that Freud’s view that we should love our neighbors only as they love us is centered around himself or the result that love would have for himself.

Palmer states in his classic work, “The courage to teach” that we teach from who we are. He says, “when I cannot see my students clearly, I cannot teach them well. When I do not know myself I cannot know them well.” (p. 2). Applying that to relationships: I interact with people from who I am and I cannot interact well if I do not know myself well.

Pride, insecurity, uncertainty, and even ambition can serve to blind me to the needs of others. As I learn about myself, with the implication that I am growing as I learn, I can better understand how best to interact with others from who I am. I can begin to see people and even love them because I am less worried about how I am perceived.

Branded as…

After years in church ministry, I have noticed that one of the most common struggles among church people is in the area of community. We simply struggle to maintain relationships that allow us to be ourselves. It makes me wonder if we are afraid of being branded as ‘less than.’ Less than a good Christian. Less than a man of character. Less than a someone who has it all together. The risk of ‘less than’ inhibits us from becoming ‘more than’… more than we can be on our own.

“To belong to a group of real friends is to be armed against influences from without.” – C. S. Lewis

Some more class time…

Okay, my ethics class is coming to an end. But, since you and I are walking through this class together (sort of) let me address a problem that was brought up to the class: C. S. Lewis writes: “If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality.”

The implication of Lewis’ statement is that there is a set of moral ideas that is truer or better. While I agree with this idea, the difficulty of holding this viewpoint comes when we try to assess the moral ideas to be included. I would obviously say that my moral standards are truer or better than a divergent set. You would say that yours are better. Handling these different moral codes requires an understanding of both values and ethics.

When we talk about a person’s moral codes we are essentially talking about their values: a person’s standards of behavior, one’s judgment on what is important in life. We can see the values a person holds through the actions of that individual. Cooper (1998) calls these actions, principles – “a general law or rule that provides a guide for action.” When we talk about ethics, Gibson (1966) defines it as seeking “to clarify the logic and adequacy of the values that shape the world; it assesses the moral possibilities which are projected and betrayed in the social give-and-take.”
Values define who a person is, principles define how values look, while ethics seeks to understand the implications those values have as they are lived out in society.
Hence, our dilemma… how do we address divergent personal moral codes in the organizational setting or even in life? (It is good to note that we are not talking about an ethical dilemma at this point, but about a difference in moral codes between people, maybe between employee and employer, maybe between friends.) I don’t think we can actually address personal moral codes in a manner that will bring all moral codes to a “unified ideal.” However, an organization should have an understanding of how to reach a necessary decision when divergent moral codes create ethical dilemmas.
Cooper’s (2000) model for effective decision-making, or Geva’s (1998) phase model might be used. The idea is to have a strategy in order to be comprehensive or strategic in arriving at a decision. As we walk through a decision-making process we can begin to shed the emotion or gut reaction involved when a dilemma first comes to light. Whatever plan we use, it is important to take a wide view of the dilemma. A wide view takes in all the ethical complexities and enables us to see more clearly our own values and the external obligations under which we act. (Cooper, 2000) There are many alternatives to every ethical decision. Having a plan of action helps us see the alternatives and their consequences before a decision is reached.

Just musing…

Brian