Free Us From Self-Complacency

Peasant Times-Dispatch Issue 22

Loyalty to a doctrine ends in adherence to the interpretation we give it. Only loyalty to a person frees us from all self-complacency.

- Don Colacho

Beginnings

I thought a lot about the quote with which I would inaugurate Season Three. This one stuck out to me as the best option, connecting to many, many other ideas—a two sentence introduction to peasantly thought.

The quote is from Don Colacho, who will get a lot of play in future articles. His real name is Nicolás Gómez Dávila. He is a Colombian philosopher and he wrote several books, his most famous being collections of aphorisms which he called “Annotations from an implicit text”¹, meaning that he didn’t write the book, the book is implicit between all the aphorisms.

This quote is #2,445 on the list I found.

A Detour Through Memory

Allow me to share a little snippet of my life². When I was younger, the question of “Who is right” was a common one for me. Not only who is right, but what is the right thing to do, what does being right even mean. I would say that even from a young age I was very concerned with forming some concept of morality. It was important to me because I did not understand it. I was not raised Catholic—I converted in 2018. My family might as well have been atheists, we did not have closely held moral beliefs. So, home life was governed by the iron law of what-parents-decree, and outside life was determined by what-is-expedient, and there was often a disconnect between those two. It left me very, very confused, morally.

When I reached the age of reason, and started piecing together my own understanding of the world—politics was the first thing I grasped for. If something is right, it should be enshrined in law. And—I found the same disconnect there too. There was no way to make law comprehensive enough to cover all things that are good and right, and there were many instances where law was even objectionable in some way or other!

I agonized over this through my teen years. I even agonized over this after becoming Catholic for a time. I was very concerned with knowing the right thing to do.

I was concerned with knowing the right thing to do because my upbringing was largely arbitrary. I could do the same actions on one day as on another, and be punished on the one and unnoticed on the other. This led to a kind of anxious complacency because I didn’t know what kind of lawgiver I was going to get between days. My inability to predict led to me mentally accepting in advance those arbitrary and unpredictable admonishments I could not figure out how to avoid. My biggest terror was that God was the same way. That I would try my best, and when I died I wouldn’t understand the calculus that sent me to heaven or hell. That God was as arbitrary as my upbringing.

This quote resonated with me because it shows that written doctrines are not the answer, rather a perfect lawgiver is the answer; a lawgiver defined by love and justice and virtue. A lawgiver who told us what to do, gave us the tools to do it, and left us to the hard work of ensuring we do what He said to His satisfaction, and not our own.

What It’s All About

When doctrines are written, it is only natural for humans to quibble about what the words mean. “Thou shalt not kill”—what about times of war? Our human reason naturally reaches for exceptions. You cannot be loyal to a doctrine in the same way as being loyal to a person. Loyalty to a person, like a spouse, involves equal measures of serving and being served. Spouses are loyal to each other and are obliged to give themselves to each other, share their labors for the good of each other. They are working towards each other’s good.

Contrast this with cinematic (or real) representations of contracts. “It’s not in the contract so I’m not doing it.” If it’s not in writing, it doesn’t exist. If the writing is not clear and specific, there are loopholes. Contracts do not inspire loyalty, they are almost by definition mercenary.

This quote has so many other applications. The American Constitution is a written document. So many of America’s problems today have at their root a fundamental disagreement over what the written doctrines mean, or how they should be applied.

Catholicism is not an arcane pile of religious doctrines, but fundamentally loyalty to the triune Godhead. Loyalty to Jesus Christ, fully man, fully God.

Written rules or doctrines are inherently limiting. If the rule says you cannot do x, then you can only be punished when x is not done—it binds the law-giver as well as the law-receiver. Loyalty to a person, then, is limitless. God wants our full, loving, obedient commitment to virtue. God wants nothing less than everything.

So, what does self-complacency mean? It’s the tendency to lean back in your chair at 3:00pm and say, “I’ve done enough work today.” It’s the tendency to be satisfied with ourselves about whatever endeavor we are working on. That tendency to look for loopholes which, surprise surprise, we leverage to interpret doctrines favorably to ourselves. But when we were kids and some parent told us to clean our room—can we lean back and say “this is clean enough”? No—that parent is going to come and inspect. We have to make them happy, not us. When a spouse asks us for help in some task, can we fulfill it halfway and assume we “helped enough”? Can we tell God that we were virtuous enough? This is why loyalty to a person frees us from self-complacency. At the end of all things, Jesus will be coming to inspect our spiritual rooms, and we have to make sure it will make Him happy.

Being Peasants

Who are we loyal to? Where are we self complacent? Can we leverage this aphorism to free ourselves from self-complacency in other areas of our lives? Is it work—are we working to the letter of the law while skirting the spirit? Can we do our work in such a way that our boss, our customer, our whomever, even Jesus Himself is happy? What about our family life? Our errands, our responsibilities?

The standard of “good enough” fails when you consider the people you are affecting. And, if you follow the chain long enough, everything you do can be oriented towards making Jesus happy. Martin Luther King Jr approached this idea with his quote about being the best street sweeper³. Sweep the streets such that Jesus is happy with your work. Don’t work to your standards, work to His.

God is Him unto whom all hearts are open, all desires are known, and from whom no secrets are hid. Loyalty to God entails acting in such a way that you can tell Him honestly that you did your best, and He will look at your works and find no disagreement.

There can be no self-complacency until then.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Thank you for reading! God bless!

AJPM

1. “Escolios a un Texto Implícito” is the title in the original Spanish.

2. Part of Season Three, I have decided, will be a little more personal and not just philosophical. Let me tell you a little about who I am. I think it’s important to peasantliness. Maybe this space can be a little digital village, where everyone knows each other. You can probably infer a fair bit about me from my writing, but indirect data transfer is not the same as direct. So this is me, introducing myself to you all—perhaps for the first time.

3. “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”