Is your conscience a good measure for doing the right thing?

This is a question that has been circling around some of the reading I've been doing lately. In a column from December, 1965, Dorothy Day reflects on the role of conscience when it comes to how one feels about participating in war. Notably, she writes that one's conscience can be wrong, or ill-formed; but you should still follow it.

“If a man truly thinks he is combating evil and striving for the good, if he truly thinks he is striving for the common good, he must follow his conscience regardless of others.”

People can have deeply set convictions on things or a passion for some sort of idealized good that they want to see in the world. I guess Day’s starting place here is that you should follow those convictions as opposed to ignoring them. However, that doesn't immediately mean that your conscience is taking you in the right direction. This is why she goes further and suggests that our conscience must be continually formed.

“But he always has the duty of forming his conscience by studying, listening, being ready to hear his opponent’s point of view.”

For our actions to be meaningful, they need to come from some deeper value or conviction; but we must keep bringing those values and convictions back to the testing ground that can only come from deeper reflection. This is the sort of thought > praxis > thought model that I remember encountering when I first read Paulo Freire many years ago. Both our convictions and our actions require ongoing formation.

That said, I believe the formation of one's conscience is a much deeper process than simply 'doing your own research.' We need something to orient ourselves, and this is my proposal for a guiding ethic (or at least an acknowledgement of my own).

My current studying has had me returning to another favourite writer and thinker of mine, William Stringfellow (who I was very close to doing a thesis on in my Masters). He writes this,

“The beginning of conscience, in a Christian sense, is realizing that every action or omission, even those which seem routine and trivial, is consequentially related to the lives of all other human beings on the face of the earth... Conscience, in other words, is knowing that people are related to, and responsible for, each other in all things." (Stringfellow, Dissenter in a Great Society)

Stringfellow is no stranger to ethics (he has a trilogy on the topic). If you're looking for a place to orient yourself—you could do worse. This idea of interconnection, that our actions have impact, is crucial to trying to understand (and solve) big problems. It forces us to confront the reality that we participate in a system and in doing so we uphold and benefit from it. I'd personally push this even further than Stringfellow does here and suggest that we are interconnected with all things, not just humans. But his point remains.

Dorothee Sölle (another favourite) expands on this, suggesting that if you want to understand your own praxis—that is, do deep reflection on your actions—it begins by asking who is being victimized and who is profiting? These two questions have been core to my own conscience formation for many years now. And while they might not always offer easy answers, they help orient me in these complicated systems of interdependence to which we are all bound. By knowing who suffers and who profits by and in these systems, we can try and better untangle the ways we knowingly—and unknowingly—participate. This knowledge should then form our actions.

So to return to Day—yes, follow your conscience, but your conscience alone is not enough. It must be formed and reformed by deep reflection on the context you are trying to live within.

"There are not enough historians among us."

One thing that stood out while reading a decade of Dorothy Day's columns is how much time she spends in sharing the stories of ordinary, local activists and saints. These are the people that she regularly visited and corresponded with, regular folks—families, carpenters, painters—who were responding to need in their own context.

In one column from 1967, she laments the way many younger people who are engaged in activism did not know the history of all these people who made up the Catholic Worker of decades past. This is what it is to record the lives of the saints, not to capture a few great deeds, but to show how their faith led them to act in many daily little ways.

I'm drawn to this idea of how her columns helped bring together this community of workers across the whole country and how sharing and celebrating their stories made them a part of it all.

“We have to live with the positions we take, and at the same time we are bound to be beset with all kinds of human doubts… I know what human fear is and how often it keeps us from following our conscience.”

In an April column of 1968, Dorothy Day reflects on the way fear often prevents us from being willing to sacrifice on behalf of others. She is writing this in the aftermath of the death of MLK and the way in which white Christians have been afraid to stand in solidarity for racial justice in the south—even when they knew it to be the right thing to do. And I think she seems to believe that sometimes we need to be pushed into it because otherwise fear would keep winning. There's something in our nature that resists the idea of giving up our comforts, safety, and self-interest for the sake of others. But this, for Day, is what the church is: a kingdom formed around giving up one's life for the good of other people. Its the one thing that makes any of it compelling.

“It is not worthwhile writing or speaking unless you say what is in your heart and say it as you see things. This is the way. This is what converts expect when they come into the Church and they find it in the lives of the saints who accept the idea of death in whatever form it takes. We say all these things in our prayers and don’t mean them. And God takes us at our word, fortunately, and so we are saved in spite of ourselves; we are dragged in by the hair of the head.”

Our hearts may know it to be true, but fear stops us from acting on it. This is what she means by us not actually meaning the things we pray. If we meant it, we would live it. And so sometimes we need to be dragged in to acting against our self-interest because we can't seem to get there on our own.

There's an interesting, and almost throwaway line at the end of one of Dorothy Day's columns from 1966. She's sharing examples of people with radical visions for transforming society from the bottom up. She references an Italian social activist, Danilo Dolci, who organized something called 'reverse-strikes' in which he had over 100 unemployed men fix a public road and was arrested for it. She then closes saying,

"The sacredness of private property is not yet challenged by any but the Marxist."

So what did Day mean by this? It's hard to know for sure, but I can try and extrapolate a bit by first digging into what Marx meant when he wrote about the abolition of private property. It's important to note that what Marx is getting at is not the individual ownership of things; but the seizure of property by the bourgeoisie class to control the means of production and create capital for themselves. This turned workers into wage-labourers. When Marx talks about abolishing private property, he means abolishing bourgeoisie property and restoring it to being the commons.

Coming back to Day's comments around the sacredness of private property, I can't help but think of Hannah Arendt's idea that the modern social era would see the collapse of the public and private realms into one another—describing what would emerge as a sort of "collective house keeping" in which the protection of private interests would dominate the public sphere. Is this not what is happening when pipelines, factories, or vehicles are seemingly afforded more rights and dignity than (certain) humans or the protection of the natural world? What is sacred is what we value above all else.

I also can't help but hear a subtle rebuke to the church when she says only the Marxist has challenged this. Though in typical Day fashion, she extends an opportunity and a challenge to the church with the use of 'yet'. It's never too late.

In another column from 1965, Day quotes St Gertrude, a 13th Century nun, who said, "property, the more common it becomes, the more holy it becomes." For Day, this is of course a call for each of us to do our part. Like the loaves and fishes of the gospels, to share what we have with others and see how in becoming common it becomes sacred. It's about how it is used—and for whom—that makes it so.

I've been trying a new way of reading and note taking in an attempt to cure a bad reading habit I've fallen into over the last few years. Basically, I get into an obsessive note taking approach that copies down what I'm reading as I read it. The problem is that this a) doesn't use much discretion in terms of capture and b) really slows me down when reading a book.

So, I've started a new habit. Rather than taking notes as I read, I'm now using annotation stickies to mark the spots I want to capture. I'll underline or add a line or so of dialogue in the margins and keep going. Part of this includes the discipline of being much more discerning in what parts I want to capture. I am then copying all those annotations into my notes after I have finished the book.

As a result, the way in which I am reading and sharing those reflections on here is changing slightly. I'll likely be reflecting on books after I have finished reading them rather than as I go. And my notes might be a little less linear.