<div dir="ltr"><p style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:-0.5pt"><font face="georgia, serif">Dear Visionaries:</font></p><p style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:-0.5pt"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><div><font face="georgia, serif">Some years ago I published this in two other newspapers, but this is the first time for the Daily News, so here it is for those who do not subscribe.</font></div><div><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="georgia, serif">I thought I would take a break from the election, and take Michelle Obama's advice: "We go high when they go low."</font></div><div><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="georgia, serif">A reader sent me a kind response and offered this wonderful quotation from Mary Baker Eddy:</font></div><div><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></div><p style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:-0.5pt"><font face="georgia, serif">" We are all sculptors, working at various forms, molding and chiseling thought….We must form perfect models in thought and look at them continually, or we shall never carve them out in grand and noble lives" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, <span style="letter-spacing:-0.5pt">p. 248).</span></font></p><p style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:-0.5pt"><font face="georgia, serif"><span style="letter-spacing:-0.5pt"><br></span></font></p><p style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:-0.5pt"><font face="georgia, serif"><span style="letter-spacing:-0.5pt">May you all be good, beauty, and truthful,</span></font></p><p style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:-0.5pt"><font face="georgia, serif"><span style="letter-spacing:-0.5pt"><br></span></font></p><p style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:-0.5pt"><font face="georgia, serif">nfg</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="margin-right:0.5in;text-align:center;line-height:150%"><b><font face="georgia, serif">This I Believe:</font></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="margin-right:0.5in;text-align:center;line-height:150%"><b><font face="georgia, serif">Truth, Beauty, and Goodness</font></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="margin-right:0.5in;text-align:center;line-height:150%"><font face="georgia, serif">By Nick Gier, the
Palouse Pundit</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right:0.5in;line-height:150%"><font face="georgia, serif"> Author’s
note: This essay was submitted, along with tens of thousands of others, to
NPR’s series “This I Believe.”</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right:0.5in;line-height:150%"><font face="georgia, serif"> I
believe in truth, goodness, and beauty. I believe that ethics is not a
mechanical following of moral rules or simply doing one’s duty. Rather, it
means that truly good person is one who is wise, courageous, compassionate,
loyal, just, tolerant, and patient. Above all, I believe that good people are
those who are always true to themselves.</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:150%"><span style="color:black"><font face="georgia, serif">I
believe that Aristotle was correct in making pride a virtue second only to
wisdom. For him pride is knowing what we
have accomplished and freely acknowledging that we have done it. Aristotle did not respect people who hid their
lights under a bushel. </font></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:150%"><font face="georgia, serif">Aristotle believed that humility is a
vice, and people who do not own their accomplishments (and all of us have
achieved something) are not being true to themselves. On the other side, people who are vain
glorious, claiming more they have done, suffer from false consciousness and
false pride.</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:150%"><font face="georgia, serif">Translating the beautiful Greek word <i>megalopsychia</i> as pride does not do this concept
justice. It literally means “having a
great soul.” I therefore believe that ethics is the art of making the soul
great and noble. Yes, I believe that
ethics is an art, the art of crafting a person of good character and of moral
beauty.</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right:0.5in;text-indent:0.5in;line-height:150%"><font face="georgia, serif">The ancient Chinese believed that moral
development is like the cutting and polishing of a precious stone, and even today
we say that the people we admire are real “gems.” Children should choose such people as models for
their lives, as they craft their growing moral selves from the raw materials of
their being.</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right:0.5in;line-height:150%"><font face="georgia, serif"> The
Chinese philosopher Mencius switched from stones to plants when he suggested
that we all have virtue sprouts that must be carefully nourished and
tended. If they are not, then the
virtues shrivel up and die, as many of them have done in our contemporary
culture.</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right:0.5in;line-height:150%"><font face="georgia, serif"> Gandhi
observed that although Socrates was not considered a handsome man, “to my mind
he was beautiful because all his life was striving after truth.” Some have said
that Gandhi was just as ugly as Socrates, yet I believe that one friend was
correct when he said that “there was a rare spiritual beauty that shone in Gandhi’s
face.” </font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:150%"><font face="georgia, serif">Gandhi’s moral beauty came from the
courage of being true to himself and being true to others. Moral beauty appears in lives that unites
goodness and truth. As Alexis Carrell once said: “Moral beauty is an
exceptional and very striking phenomenon. Much more than science, art and
religion, moral beauty is the basis of civilization.”</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:150%"><font face="georgia, serif">I believe that the external beauty of many
celebrities may blind us to the fact that they may be too vain glorious and self-conscious
about the attractive facades they have created.
True moral beauty is never showy and ostentatious; if it is, it is false
and only a semblance of virtue. </font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:150%"><font face="georgia, serif">One can imagine even the most crippled
and deformed presenting themselves with elegance and dignity. The literary examples of <i>Beauty and the
Beast</i> and <i>The Elephant Man</i> make this point dramatically. The final line of the former is “to judge by
appearance is to miss the beauty of our inner souls.” In the ballet version the Beast’s movements
become increasingly elegant as he is accepted by Beauty.</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:150%"><font face="georgia, serif">Virtue ethics is emulative—using the sage
or saint as a model for virtue—whereas rule ethics is based on simple
conformity and obedience. I believe that
the emulative approach engages the imagination, personalizes, and thoroughly
grounds individual moral action and responsibility. </font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:150%"><font face="georgia, serif">I believe that such an ethics naturally
lends itself to an aesthetics of virtue: the crafting of a good, true, and
beautiful person, a unique individual gem among other gems.</font></p><p style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:-0.5pt">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:150%"><font face="georgia, serif">N<a name="_GoBack"></a>ick Gier taught
philosophy and religion at the University of Idaho for 31 years. </font></p><p style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:-0.5pt"><font face="georgia, serif"> </font></p><div><span style="font-family:georgia,serif">A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. </span><br></div><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><font size="2"><div><font face="georgia, serif"><br>-Greek proverb</font></div><div><font face="georgia, serif"><br>
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not
in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it
without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your
own understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.<br>
<br>
--Immanuel Kant<br>
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