The WORDS WE LIVE BY

A treasury of the words that have shaped America ranges from the Pledge of Allegiance to the creed of the Elvis Presley Impersonator's Association.

Chapter 1

DO UNTO OTHERS

THE EVOLUTION OF THE GOLDEN RULE

Whatever happened to the Golden Rule? It seems only yesterday it was a figure of everyday speech, an idea so familiar and unassailable that it could confidently be invoked by name alone. In the booming 1920s the Western Implement Dealers Association made "Obey the Golden Rule!" the very first precept of its code of ethics. The Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo (also known as the Fraternal Order of Lumbermen) endorsed it as nothing less than "the basic principle of peace and prosperity for the world." Roger Ward Babson, investment wizard and the founder of Babson College, went so far as to claim that "the Golden Rule is founded on the same law of Action and Reaction about which Sir Isaac Newton wrote the Principia."

From today's perspective these breathless endorsements seem quaintly naive, if not disingenuous. We still refer to the Golden Rule, but much more tentatively. It seems to have lost its glister, tarnished to no small degree by the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. Yet even at the height of its popularity it was something of an enigma. It was never entirely clear, even to its staunchest supporters, what was so golden about it.

To many Americans, the very name still sums up the essence of Christian ethics. The Golden Rule epitomizes the Christian virtue of charity in thought and action, which is both an extraordinary reduction and a compelling one. It naturally leads to such questions as: How can anyone be a Christian and a racist at the same time? That is, how can one embrace the Golden Rule and yet hate one's fellow man? The answer, not only for Christians but for people of all faiths (because every religion has its own version of the same golden principle), is that it's impossible -- in theory. Yet it is all too common in practice. And this is where the promise held out by the name is not fulfilled.

The Golden Rule, after all, is not a binding law but merely a figure of speech. Its strength lies in its ability to compress all of ethics into one sentence. It principal weakness, not surprisingly, is its generality. How could anything so simple serve as a rule for all men for all time? Yet the fact remains that it has done just that, and apparently continues to do so..Just as the heavens revolve around the polestar, the course of human events seems to swirl around the Golden Rule. But like the polestar, its constancy can only be appreciated through the lens of time -- through a consideration of its past. Without some sense of its history, the rule remains unavailable to us.

Is It Just?

In American culture, what goes by the name of the Golden Rule seems on the surface to be a simple proposition: Do as you would be done by. But is it really all that simple? From its apparent beginnings as a Victorian platitude promoted by children's primers, catechisms, and embroidered samplers, this modest proposition somehow acquired the status of a self-evident truth -- one of the pillars of the American way of life. When the great Civil War-era statesman Charles Sumner died, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier could write with no irony, "His statecraft was the Golden Rule/ His right of vote a sacred trust/ Clear, over threat and ridicule/ All heard his challenge: 'Is it just?'" Whittier's contemporary, William Dean Howells, in his 1884 novel The Rise of Silas Lapham, has one character reprimand another by saying, "In our dealings with each other we should be guided by the Golden Rule."

What Whittier seems to imply is that Sumner always did unto others as he wished to be done unto. But the poet was hardly in a position to know. It seems more likely that Whittier is using the term Golden Rule in a more general way. Charles Sumner apparently lived up to a standard of conduct which clearly distinguished right from wrong. We just don't know what that standard was, and neither did Whittier.

In Silas Lapham, on the other hand, Howells's down-on-his-luck character seems to be getting at something else entirely. What he wants, alas, is a handout -- a misreading of the rule which hints at another fundamental weakness: that the Golden Rule can be construed as a demand to do for others what you would wish for yourself if you were in the same pitiful plight. In both instances the rule is invoked in earnest, yet with no apparent insight. It is not at all clear what it means.

Back then it hardly mattered. In Whittier's time, as compared to today, Americans were less self-conscious, and more apt to speak and believe in platitudes. To "go by" the Golden Rule or any one of hundreds of old saws meant to draw from a common fount of received ideas which were not to be taken too literally. A populace schooled in proverbial wisdom understood in what sense "golden" meant fitting and proper, and they accepted it. But now, with our sense of disbelief not so easily suspended, we are less inclined to take things at face value. As a result, we are often left without a clue as to how some of our culture's most common axioms work. This is one of the central paradoxes of the words invoked by this book's title: we have come to accept, and even embrace, a host of expressions we barely understand. The Golden Rule is perhaps the most glaring case in point.

Like almost all aphoristic wisdom, the Golden Rule was neither new or unique to America. It was part of our inheritance. Long before even Benjamin Franklin came along someone had already pointed out that time is money, that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, and that God helps those that help themselves. Franklin's unique talent was to be able to recast these nuggets of age-old wisdom in a distinctly American voice. Although not one of Poor Richard's concoctions, the Golden Rule was also reinvented in American culture as a paragon of equity and fairness -- a rule so simple that anyone could learn it and profit by it. Naturally, almost everyone accepted it. But that was part of its problem. What started out as the gospel truth soon turned into a deceptively solemn piece of high-minded yet dissembling rhetoric -- a symbol of good faith instead of the real thing. By the 1920s the Golden Rule had become a throwaway gesture in pretentious codes of ethics, and by the 1950s an obligatory plank in every politician's political creed.

The Golden Rule's golden age (indeed the golden age of aphorisms) appears to have come and gone. Even politicians now shy away from using it. As soon as it became an artifact of popular culture, it became all too easy to write off. One of the Great Ideas that drifted into the mainstream, it has been buffeted about and cast upon the rocks of cynicism and doubt. Which naturally raises the question, is it worth rescuing?

If the name could be jettisoned, this would be a simpler matter. The problem with it, whether most people are aware of it or not (and for the most part they are not), is that it carries a wealth of historical, cultural, and religious associations that make it something more than a generic label. As a matter of historical fact, the name is a relatively recent development. The rule managed to circulate widely across all cultures for well over a thousand years without the benefit of a 10-karat name. Which is to say that what we so blithely call the Golden Rule turns out to be a complex idea with a long history -- one that lies behind every philosopher's and theologian's attempt to understand how we should relate to each other. Despite its critics (and there have been many), it still has something useful to say. It is one of those rare artifacts in which the real treasure seems to lie beneath the gliding.

The Law and the Prophets

What exactly is the Golden Rule? Most of us think we know, although the word "exactly" should give us pause, because it implies (correctly) that the question cannot possibly be as simple as it seems.

Properly speaking, the term Golden Rule -- capitalized -- refers to a passage from the Sermon on the Mount. Of the two versions given in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Matthew's is the most widely accepted. Its most canonical English translation is the King James Version of 1611, which reads:

Therefore whatsoever ye would that others should do to you, do ye even so unto them.

Luke is more succinct:

As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also unto them likewise.

But in common parlance the name has become generic, and when not capitalized it can represent any number of seemingly equivalent statements. Those who cannot quote chapter and verse typically resort to such accessible variants as the nonscriptural "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you," or the even more abbreviated "Do as you would be done by." In Victorian America, schoolchildren often learned the Golden Rule in verse. The New England Primer rendered it this way:

Deal with another as you'd have

Another deal with you;

What you're unwilling to receive

Be sure you'd never do.

Isaac Watts, the English hymn writer, set the idea to music with this lyric:

Be you to others kind and true,

As you'd have others be to you;

And neither do nor say to men

Whate'er you would not take again.

Although these variations on a theme manage to get the same basic idea across, they should not be considered perfectly interchangeable. This should dispel a common assumption. In searching for connections we often forget how context (or a lack of it) can alter meaning. In the case of the Golden Rule, each rephrasing repackages an old idea, and in some cases the packaging (if not the label) overshadows the content.

To set the record straight, Matthew does not single out any passage from the Sermon on the Mount by giving it a name. In fact nowhere in the Bible does anyone refer to a "golden" rule. Nor did any of the Church fathers, in their lengthy disquisitions and interpretations of Scripture, use such a name. Saints Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas recognized the importance of what we call the Golden Rule within the system of Christian morality. Each of them subjected it to an extended analysis because they knew it required interpretation, but they did not think of it as particularly golden, or as an idea that should stand alone.

In Matthew's account, the maxim comes with this tag-line -- "for this is the Law and the Prophets" -- which is critical. It establishes the rule as a summary of Old Testament codes given in the biblical books referred to as the Law and the Prophets. It is meant to be considered as part of a tradition of preexisting laws. When classical scholars refer to the Stoic Maxim, which is yet another version of the same rule stated in negative form ("Do not do to others what you do not wish them to do to you"), they invoke it within the context of Stoic philosophy as a whole. Which is to say that it can only be fully appreciated in context. This is one of the historical facts that the use of the term "golden rule" glosses over. When pious writers invoke the name, most have in mind the passage from Matthew or Luke, in many cases without being aware that the Law and the Prophets come with it, or that the Stoic philosophers promoted it, or that all of the great religions of antiquity acknowledged it, or that great thinkers of all cultures have long debated it. What the name did was to establish a virtual monopoly on the idea. Like a trademark, it legitimized Christianity's sole proprietorship over what would otherwise be in the public domain. The irony of the situation is that the term "golden rule" originally referred to something else entirely.

By the time Isaac Watts began referring to the Golden Rule in the mid-1700s, it was already an established figure of speech, although with two very different meanings. When it was first coined in the late 1500s, the term belonged properly to mathematics. It first shows up around the year 1575 to describe the Rule of Three, an algebraic procedure for solving proportions. A century would go by before anyone thought to use it to describe a type of reciprocity between people rather than numbers. When Watts and other devout writers got hold of it, they managed to wrest it away from mathematics, and solidify the usage that we have today.

Surprisingly, this usage did not take hold outside of the English-speaking world. The Germans, Italians, French, and Spanish have a term that is roughly equivalent to "golden rule," but in those cultures it has retained its primary sense of the mathematical Rule of Three. Only in Anglo-American culture does the name carry any cachet as a moral precept~ And while the name made the scriptural maxim easy to refer to, the use of the word golden had a curious effect: it both elevated and trivialized the idea it described.

How did the naming come about? No doubt the King James Bible had something to do with it. Although not the first English translation of the Scriptures, the King James was the first one authorized to be read in churches, and thus it circulated widely. Its influence was felt in all of English literature, to the extent that it "established the rhythms of spoken English" as the Encyclopaedia Britannica asserts. With the gospels made accessible in the common tongue, isolated passages -- many of them from the Sermon on the Mount -- became more and more common in everyday speech.

By the mid-1600s the Golden Rule had become a frequently used (although still not named) expression among the scripturally literate, who began to abbreviate it, paraphrase it, and sing its praises. They hailed it, along with its counterpart love thy neighbor as thyself, as a new commandment, one that should rightfully stand beside the Ten Commandments as the embodiment of Christian morality. It must have seemed natural to give it a suitably exalted name.

The spirit of the Enlightenment also made a golden rule of morality seem plausible. The Age of Reason raised the possibility of the perfectibility of mankind, and laws of ethics laid out by such thinkers as Spinoza and Hobbes unfolded in empirical fashion much like the axioms of geometry and algebra, with the Golden Rule serving as a fundamental theorem. In those days the leap from mathematics to ethics did not appear to be a particularly dangerous one. Although the comment may now appear to be farfetched, Roger Babson's comparison of the Golden Rule to Newton's law of actions and reactions was not an isolated crackpot idea, nor a particularly original one, In his Boyle lecture of 1705, the English metaphysician Samuel Clarke had said much the same thing: "Whatever I judge reasonable or unreasonable that another should do for me, that by the same judgment I declare reasonable or unreasonable that I in like case should do for him. And to deny this either in word or action is as if a man should contend that, though two and three are equal to five, yet three and two are not so."

But what is reasonable is not necessarily undeniable. Responding to this line of thinking in the Encyclopaedia Britannica almost two centuries later, the English philosopher Henry Sidgwick quipped, "Let us grant that there is as much intellectual absurdity in acting unjustly...