Foolish Consistency

I will never forget Daisy.

At the time I was a young trainee in a Social Security office in a moderately large city in the Southwest.  Daisy was a veteran claims representative, her graying hair, exquisite manners and charming Carolina drawl placing her back in the Old South and almost masking the lively mind behind those alert blue eyes.  Daisy had a unique role in the office.  When derelicts (and there were many of them) came to the office, Daisy was always called to interview them and resolve their problems. 

The derelicts were not easy to work with.  Stumbling in only half-sober, reeking with unwashed clothes, used alcohol and vomit, they often were almost incoherent in their complaints, forgetful of the facts and willing to invent any story that would resupply their drinking money.  Frequently their smell was so stupefying that desks were pushed together to permit interviewing at a distance far enough to prevent gagging. That often involved interviews conducted in a semi-shout.  Daisy interviewed them not from being drafted, but by her own choice. 

Daisy was angelic in her interviewing.  Compassionate, patient, struggling to understand and resolve the problems that had brought them there, she provided those derelicts a caring presence that their mother would have had difficulty matching.  Watching her in action, one knew one was witnessing someone who truly identified with and cared for the troubled people she was there to help, an enlightened person signaling a new future for the old South.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.  In casual conversation back in the employee lunchroom, Daisy’s language and opinions were those of a genteel redneck.  Frequently employing the n-word to describe her mostly African-American clients, she made it clear that she viewed them as little more than incompetent children, incapable of any intelligent action in their own behalf.  Her opinions on the social issues surrounding her clients were those of her slave-holding grandparents.  Yet it was clear watching her in action, that her solicitude for their wellbeing went far beyond the limits dictated by her upbringing and professed views.  In short, Daisy’s actions and her beliefs were inconsistent in major ways.

I thought of Daisy recently when I remembered a “daily aphorism” in the local paper:  “Don’t judge a man by his opinions, but by what his opinions have made him. — G.C. Lichtenberg”.

My first reaction was puzzlement followed by disagreement.  Are not people the sum of their opinions?  How can we distinguish between the man and the opinions he holds?  Right action and right view go hand in hand.  Then I remembered Daisy.

As human beings faced with complex choices we favor consistency.  Consistency has many strengths.  A presumption of consistency enables us to infer many effects and relationships from certain knowledge of only a few.  Presuming consistency eases our moral choices by enabling us to see our enemies as all bad, our friends as all good.  No one looks for good in Hitler or evil in Ghandi.  Even Emerson, proud excoriater of consistency as “the hobgoblin of little minds”, was nonplused when Thoreau accused him of inconsistency for not joining him in prison for civil disobedience. 

Inconsistency confuses us.  It violates our deepest moral sense.  Good people should do good things consistently; evil flows from evil consistently. Justice is based on the search for results consistent with causes.  In some ways consistency constitutes our deepest value.  An inconsistent universe is one based on whimsy, not Justice, on unfathomable fragmentation, not rational wholeness.  We cannot understand an inconsistency that violates our sense of wholeness, our belief in an underlying unity of Being.  Belief in an underlying Consistency knits together our science (the quest for “a general unified theory”) and our theology (God as the ground of all Being).

It is in our theology that the “consistency imperative” gets us in the most trouble.  Consistency requires that God be all Good or else senselessly arbitrary – a construct we find repugnant.  To be not only Good, but Perfect in every way is the measure of a monotheist’s God.  By definition God is the best of everything, and anything less cannot be worshipped.

The ancients faced no such problem.  Odin had one eye, Hephaestus limped, Zeus was a cruel philanderer, Loki a trickster, Apollo the Patron of thieves.  Even Jahweh as a tribal God was subject to jealous rages that He later regretted.   Jahweh once threatened to kill Abraham, even though he had already identified him as father to countless peoples.

Mark Twain remarked that Wagner’s music was much better than it sounded.  He may have been right as well as funny.  Perhaps that’s why I celebrate people like Daisy, whose actions are much better than their words, however inconsistent they may be.  And why I appreciate people like John Boehner, who finally got upset enough to be inconsistent and seek compromise.  He may revert to foolishly consistent obstructionism, but for awhile at least he was wisely inconsistent with his principles.  Sometimes, consistency is the foolish course.  Keep up the good work, John.