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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 8, 2002
Resolution
Last Sunday was the beginning of Advent as well as the last day of a quick two-week holiday I took with a view to the restoration of my own sanity. (My job consists of spending long days and sometimes nights chiefly working the Internet inquiring into all the evil in the world -- not the healthiest occupation.) Advent Sunday is moreover that day on which I attempt to put a new year's resolutions into play. I used to make these for New Year's Day like most other people but found that didn't work. For one thing New Year's tends to start with a hangover which is the death of resolutions as I've found. The beginning of the Christian as opposed to the civil year seemed a better moment to invoke my more sober intentions. And since Advent Sunday has the advantage of always falling on a Sunday there are fewer than the usual distractions. With a bit of luck one might even take a long walk -- long enough to remember what the resolutions were. Now as I grow older I find that I make more and more reasonable resolutions and less and less ambitious ones. I tend even to phrase them as "more" and "less" not as "do" and "don't". For without a certain amount of "bend" in a resolution it is much more likely to break. When I was young I made extremely brittle resolutions and they would get smashed on their first trip out. This year for instance I resolved to spend less time sparring with readers in e-mail. Not "no time sparring" for that would be too brittle. Just much less . For the truth is I am afflicted with something like a guard dog sensibility and it is not in my nature to sit silently in my kennel when someone rattles my fence. I lose all kinds of time to pointless leaping and barking when the offender for his part is merely passing by. The goad which cost him only a moment to compose ("Ya? Prove it!") can easily cost me an hour in reply. Then given the ease with which the correspondent has attached his long list of "cc."s we wake up all the neighbours. And soon all the other dogs in the block are leaping and barking for each other's attention. Donald Rumsfeld is someone you may have heard of. His day (and night) job is running the defence department of the country next door. The reader will easily imagine it is a demanding job requiring for instance some steely self-discipline. Quite apart from what he is achieving or not achieving in his management of the Pentagon I was curious about how he manages his time. For here is someone whose e-mail inbox must make mine look empty. I happened to learn the other week a little out-of-school secret. Mr. Rumsfeld was giving advice on time management to his staff and the major item was the e-mail inbox. His advice was to stay on top of it but he also explained how. The trick is apparently to remember "your own agenda". The letters to answer are the ones that offer an opportunity to advance it. The letters to ignore are the many that don't. And ignore means ignore as ruthless means ruthless. At first sight that sounds a little mean. Why should he expect the world to work exclusively to the agenda of Mr. Rumsfeld or his staff? But then you remember he is the Secretary of Defence of the United States of America and a little light comes on. I don't know whether the reader has also heard of Immanuel Kant's "categorical imperative". It is one of those criteria of moral obligation or in the case of Kant the only one. "Act only on that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." In other words such that if everyone did the same thing in the same situation the world would be a better place. I love "high-minded" and this is about the most high-minded thing in the secular literature of the planet so I love to just stare at it as at a very tall building. My own view is that it will never work that the good of the world requires that people sometimes act differently in approximately the same situation. Or to put this a different way that the world is so complex and various that there are no two situations exactly the same. There is further deep truth in the observation of Kant's younger contemporary William Blake that: "One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression." And goodness will not reduce to reason alone any more than theology reduces to philosophy. A bit of spontaneous faith is required even revelation and faith reaches beyond reason. Nevertheless having skated around the proposition in detail I shall at least own that it is "true in the main" -- like several of the other criteria of moral obligation that Kant so carefully punctured before sending up his own balloon. We should do as we'd be done by. So what would happen if everyone acted on Mr. Rumsfeld's advice? If the whole world suddenly decided to answer only those e-mails that provided an opportunity to advance one's personal agenda? I think the world would then become a slightly better place. In fact I think this is obvious. To start with to get any person's attention one would have to write something that was interesting to her or useful in some way -- as opposed to something interesting or useful only to oneself. Reciprocally one would be compelled to keep things of interest or use to no other person only to oneself. At least 95 per cent of the clutter in e-mail is thereby eliminated. People would in the course of doing this become perforce more polite as well as more interesting and useful to one another. They would spell words more carefully and check over their sentences to see if they made any sense. They would put subject-headers at the top that gave some hint what the e-mail was about instead of "Re: Re: Re:". So I've decided to make this part of my personal agenda. Self-interest requires that we all shape up. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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