Ethos, Part IV: You Can Pick Your Friends; You Can Pick Your Ethos; But You Can’t Pick Your Friends’ Ethos

A friend and mentor of mine, Bill, recently shared his ambivalence about continuing to speak out politically because it seems futile. Many people feel that it’s like slamming their head into a wall to go in circles of dialogue solely with people who already agree with them. Or they feel ever-bolstered to dig into their own position because all the voices around them confirm their own beliefs and negate contradictory thoughts, voices, and opinions. At either end of the dichotomy—welcoming or fearing insular thought—what purpose is served in only ever reaching our in-group? What good does it do to engage at all? Why bother?

Bill has bothered because he’s deeply concerned that his silence would equal complicity in the denigration of the democratic norms of his beloved country. Bill informally polled his social media friends for their take on whether or not it’s useful to keep speaking out and he got an overwhelming response, the general tenor of which was that it’s our responsibility as citizens to keep speaking out. I was one of those people, ready with my Edmund Burke-attributed quote: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," but someone else beat me to it. I really believe in that quote because evil preys upon division and division requires silence. Yet I share Bill’s ambivalence. What good does it do to whisper or even shout amongst our own in-group? If a tree screams protest, but there’s no one in the forest to hear, is there really a scream of protest? No compromise can be made if we refuse to hear each other, and no solutions are brokered.

Recently, I’ve been exploring ethos, and arrived at its third component: eunoia. From ancient Greek, eunoia means ‘well mind’ or ‘beautiful thinking.’ It’s typically translated as “goodwill’, although Cicero defined it as what modern speakers would call benevolence.1 Rhetorically speaking, eunoia refers to the goodwill cultivated between a speaker and their audience.2

[Just for funsies: eunoia is the shortest word in the English language that contains all five vowels.3 You’re welcome in advance should you get this answer on Jeopardy!]

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes that for eunoia, it is necessary to “bear good will to each other and wish good things for each other, without this escaping [each other’s] notice”4 (1156a4–5). Goodwill requires reciprocity and wanting what’s best for another person for one of three reasons: 1). the goodness of the other’s nature, 2). the pleasure gained in relationship with them, and/or 3). because there is something to personally gain if things go well for that other person.

That third reason may sound cynical, but it applies to elected officials. Politicians need votes from constituents, and voters need a representative that will advocate for them and implement solutions to their problems. The relationship is inherently reciprocal and, for the savvy candidates that tend to get elected, a natural source of goodwill. The most successful candidates do their best to cultivate goodwill beyond the bald quid pro quo. Some project an image of goodness, embodying qualities that voters tend to respect—like 2008 “No Drama” Barack Obama, who was a political outsider who seemed to perhaps have what it took to unite the country and change the political paradigm. He inspired goodwill by branding his perceived goodness. Other candidates are friendly and relatable, playing on the pleasure it is to be with them personally—how many people voted for George W. Bush because they felt like he was a dude they could grab a beer with? Bush and Obama were candidates that successfully developed eunoia.

In the elections I’ve witnessed, political eunoia has become increasingly divisive. We see it in every primary campaign, where candidates are positioning their goodwill in relation to the extremes of their political party. Once they win a party nomination, the race is on to scramble back to more moderate positions to maximize goodwill with the largest portion of the electorate: the people in the middle. But in the last 20 years or so, those mostly reasonable people in the middle are being squeezed out. Somehow, voters have gotten in the habit of refusing to hear anything said by a politician viewed as being on the other side of the political aisle. We must break this habit. Citizens have the difficult responsibility of weighing issues and finding the candidates that best match their views, and that takes effort to understand the issues. It can be uncomfortable to vehemently agree with a candidate on one issue and vehemently disagree with another, but that’s the grey zone we’re all in. To refuse to fairly assess all candidates and their positions is to give loyalty to the eunoia of a party, or even a particular candidate, over the eunoia of the citizenry as a whole. The result is a corrupted ethos.

I recently re-read To Kill a Mockingbird and realized that it largely centers on the ethos of Maycomb, Alabama. Atticus Finch is held up as an ethical ideal that we should all strive for. In the scene with the rabid dog, Atticus applies his accrued wisdom (phronesis) in knowing not only how to shoot a gun, but why. This scene leads us to the central metaphor of the book:

Atticus said to Jem one day, ‘I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’ That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. ‘Your father’s right,’ she said. ‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy … they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’5 (Lee 103)

Atticus applies his wisdom to defend innocence—a mockingbird in the form of Tom Robinson—in the eye of a storm of corruption. He embodies excellence (arete) in his choice to pursue a career as a lawyer in the first place, but it was a career that required rigor and commitment to build and sustain, especially in such a small town. And he refuses to compromise his arete to give Tom Robinson a poor defense. He cultivates goodwill (eunoia) in the town repeatedly throughout the story, but his guiding eunoia is best summarized when he says,

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” (Lee 33)

Atticus approaches every person he meets with an assumption of their innate goodness, and the people of the town reciprocate. Miss Maudie says:

“Whether Maycomb knows it or not, we’re paying the highest tribute we can pay a man. We trust him to do right.” (Lee 269)

Atticus is beloved by the people of Maycomb as well as generations of readers because he develops such a strong bond of goodwill (eunoia) with the residents of Maycomb. And those residents entrust him with the moral charge of defending an innocent man against the bigotry of their existing cultural ethos. To be clear, Atticus did not want to defend Tom Robinson, but he simply could not abandon his wisdom (phronesis), his standard of excellence (arete), and bond of goodwill (eunoia) that informed his personal ethos by refusing:

“Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.” (Lee 120)

While Atticus exemplifies a well-cultivated ethos, the residents of Maycomb stand in juxtaposition with him. They know Tom Robinson should be acquitted or else they would not have assigned his case to Atticus. While they technically have the wisdom to do the right thing, they can’t bring themselves to apply it because it would violate their deeply flawed conception of racial excellence and the balance of goodwill amongst their community. Maycomb’s ethos is built upon a faulty foundation of phronesis, arete, and eunoia and we see the collapse of that ethos in the conviction of Tom Robinson. But while the town kills one mockingbird (Tom Robinson), there is some hope for the people of Maycomb when they free another (Boo Radley). There is a distinct shift in the standard of excellence they are willing to uphold in the aftermath of Tom Robinson’s conviction and death, which leads to a better application of their wisdom about how to defend Boo Radley. We also see a shift in the goodwill they foster when Miss Maudie bucks Maycomb’s eunoia to defend both Atticus and the black community at the ladies’ missionary circle. She speaks out amongst her friends when they engage in overt, casual racism. Mrs. Merriweather shares that her servant is unhappy in the wake of Tom Robinson’s death and paints herself as the victim of her ungrateful staff. Miss Maudie replies,

“His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?”
…
“Maudie, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said Mrs. Merriweather.
“I’m sure you do,” Miss Maudie said shortly. (Lee 266)

It takes courage for Miss Maudie to protest like this by naming the ingrained bigotry within her existing social structure, and it will take the persistence of such speaking out to move Maycomb’s ethos. Did her speaking out change Mrs. Merriweather’s attitude and thinking? Probably not. But she chose to raise her voice within her own in-group, even though she thought it was futile. Her choice shapes the kind of woman Scout hopes to become and she also becomes an ally to Calpurnia. Who knows the effect her words of protest may have had on the thoughts of other women at that gathering? This is a town in the process of demolishing a broken ethos and beginning the hard work of developing it anew. That work is dependent upon those who continue to speak out against a destructive and dehumanizing normal.

We can strive to have the fully-realized ethos of Atticus Finch, but the reality is that together, we’re really more like the town of Maycomb. Sometimes we get it right, but often our ethos is crumbling around us because we neglect its key components of applied wisdom, excellence, and goodwill. And when we get it wrong, it is our duty to examine why and how we can rebuild a better and stronger ethos. We have been through times of division before, but we don’t seem to learn the wisdom we gain each time we experience it: united we stand, divided we fall. We fail to hold ourselves to our highest standard of excellence whenever we shrug and throw our hands up and allow lies and misinformation, deceit and greed, hatred and bigotry to normalize. We degrade the bond of goodwill when we cling to homogeneous thinking. I’m still not sure that I agree with Joseph Campbell that America has no ethos,6 but we are sorely in need of taking an unflinching look at the ethos we do have.  

What are your thoughts on the current American ethos? What are your suggestions for developing goodwill across lines of division? Please share in the comments—we need your voice to help us swim.

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Notes:

Artwork: “Tree” by Clker-Free-Vector-Images is licensed under CC0 Creative Commons.

1)    Vivenza, Gloria. “Classical Roots of Benevolence in Economic Thought," Ancient Economic Thought. Routledge,1997. 198–199, 204–208
2)    Garver, Eugene. Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 112
3)    “Beautiful Vowels.” Today. BBC, 30 Oct. 2008, news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7697000/7697762.stm.
4)    Aristotle. “Book VIII.” Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by H. Rackham, Harvard Univ. Press, 2003.
5)    Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Perennial Classic ed., HarperCollins, 2002.
6)    Campbell, Joseph and Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. Doubleday, 1988. 9