Intro: Engaging Community

You may have noticed that I haven't posted on this blog for awhile. For the last month I've been frantically trying to finish my papers for this semester, so there is not time for blogging anything that would require me to type up something new. That's why I've decided to share on my blog an ethics paper I've already typed. (Ah, copy and paste...so nice.) I will post it in sections over the course of this week, so each posting doesn't become too long and burdensome to read. So check back every couple days for the next installment of . . .

"Engaging Community: Peacemaking as Method in Ethics"

How can I possibly live with you? We are too different, you and I. Our histories, our experiences, our goals and plans -- these write the narrative unique to each one of us. These narratives form our identity, how others know us and how we understand ourselves. No matter how similar, no two narratives are alike. Forged from the events within these identity-shaping narratives emerge the values that refine our character. You and I may hold different values. Or, in certain situations various values that I seek to uphold myself may conflict with one another. Even if we share similar values, our experiences are understood from our own perspectives, and we decide upon a course of action within our life experiences by weighing for ourselves the variety of values that guide us. With unique narrative identities and an assortment of different values, the simple question becomes quite complicated to answer: how can you and I live together?

When we articulate an answer to this question and act according to that answer, we are doing ethics. The discipline of ethics challenges our typical modus operandi. Mostly, we do not engage in study and debate to answer this question prior to each episode as our narrative unfolds. Life comes at us too fast. In the course of one day to the next we are more inclined to live life, simply to be and to act first, and then in retrospect we may see how we acted according a certain value, or wish that we had. The value in doing ethics is that it transforms retrospection into our new prospect, the way of anticipating the ups and downs of life-together so that we may act according to our most treasured values that form our character by which we are identified. And so if we are to pause in discernment of our prospect, doing so deliberately entails having a method for ethics.

Daniel Maguire offers a helpful method for doing ethics, one he analogously calls “the wheel method”. Imagine a wheel, complete with its hub and its spokes. In the center is the reality we experience, and so the hub in the method is to know that reality as accurately and thoroughly as we can by asking what he calls “reality revealing” questions: what happened; why, how, when, and where did it happen; who did it and to whom is it done; what are the foreseeable effects of how we may respond; and are there viable alternatives? In coming to a decision of how to respond after considering the alternatives, we evaluate the moral reality using a variety of resources, which in the wheel image correspond to the spokes connecting to the hub. These resources include creative imagination, affectivity, reason, authority, principles, comedy, tragedy, and experience -- both of the individual and of the group.(1) My intention is to facilitate a meeting of the minds by articulating a method for ethics using Maguire’s wheel and applying to it the tire of peacemaking through Peter Block’s work in civic engagement.(2) Block seeks to restore communities by bringing groups together via changing the nature of their conversation, as I will describe below.

(1) Daniel C. Maguire and A. Nicholas Fargnoli, On Moral Grounds: The Art/Science of Ethics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999), pp 41-42; 74.

(2) Block has authored many books on organizational development and leadership. His thoughts presented here can be found in the booklet “Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community” (copyright Peter Block 2005), which is sponsored by a community organizing group in Cincinnati he founded called “A Small Group”. The booklet can be downloaded from http://www.asmallgroup.net I first became aware of his work through his consultation with the Frank Zeidler Center in Milwaukee, a community organizing group that pursues a similar mission (http://frankzeidlercenter.org).

{Image: "Discord in Meditation" by Michael Guinnane www.nethermonkey.com/paintings }