This blog post below was posted in 2022 after moving to Virginia to be closer to my family. It is a short essay but contains the key sources on my own exploration of this question: How much is enough? Inspired by the great ethicists of my formative adult years, these writers were each examining what Albert Schweitzer called an ethical basis for life. I encourage you to read the post for its links to sources and collective direction these great thinkers still offer Americans and people everywhere on how to live together in peace and prosperity.
Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to live unreflectively and begins to devote himself to his life with reverence in order to raise it to its true value. To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will to live.
Albert Schweitzer became my hero/mentor at an early age. The United Methodist Church library had a copy of a little book, “All Men Are Brothers” by Charlie May Simon. This is a very special book. Follow the link to purchase one of the remaining copies.
This introduction to Schweitzer seized my imagination. To live by one’s own inner thought and develop a life reflecting values you embrace — this has guided me all through my own Earth walk.
When I was in my early 30s, I read Out of My Life and Thought, which is Schweitzer’s memoir of the major events that informed him in his search for an ethical basis for living.
“The most immediate fact of man’s conscientiousness is the assertion ‘I am life that wills to live in the midst of life that wills to live.'”
The quote is found on page 156 in Chapter 13 of the 1990 edition of Out of My Life and Time, published by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
With this assertion, a person can manifest their destiny. It is the basis from which decisions are made and a person manifests in thought, word and deed the realization of it as they may choose to live it.
Today we need to return, each of us and together as a nation, to affirm the values at the core of our actions, words, and dreams. Americans are challenged to find our true compass: what do we affirm as the ethical basis for our government?
We can then turn to the Declaration of Independence to examine its words, the basis on which it is realized: “We hold these truths as self evident that all men are created equal….”
But I would add that its time to embrace all life on earth as living relatives without which humankind cannot live. “I am life that wills to live in the midst of life that wills to live.”
I am life that wills to live in the midst of life that wills to live. ~ Albert Schweitzer in Out of My Life and Thought
In Albert Schweitzer’s conclusion about an ethical basis of life. he concludes that all of us are part of a vast interrelated life – each individual striving for liberty. A tree, a fawn, a human …
The infantile actions of a man causing destruction at home and abroad, is not liberty but a prison of human passions run amuck. There is no ethical basis for what is happening to our nation, our home, our livelihood – our future.
This morning I decided that no matter what the MAGA movement dreams, it will end in ashes and fury. The seeds of democracy are aligned with natural forces and therefore cannot be tamped down but rather will rise anew among us. Already the Destroyer has refreshed the fields of America with the seeds of Liberty.
I will return to the people who have inspired my personal growth and share them with readers and seed my field with freedom and confidence that all this horror will end with the new bloom of a nation conceived under God with freedom and liberty for all.
In the 1970s Frances Moore Lappe asked, “How much is enough?” Still actively writing, speaking and advocating for food justice, she remains one of my guides to living a sane life in The Land of Plenty for Some.
Other early and ever present guides to my adult life and what would preoccupy my work and art, Thomas Berry, Albert Schweitzer, Rachel Carson and E.F. Schumacher all addressed the same issue from different points of view: living in right relationship with all life and a sustaining Earth ecosystem.
In 2008 I published the first of my writing, Paean to the Earth, which included a little essay titled: Get A Grip Ecology. It included 5 principles by which stable ecosystems operate:
Utilizes a renewable energy source/ Does not overgraze food capacity/ Recycles essential elements/Preserves biodiversity/Moderates population size.
Lappe showed us we strayed from these principles when she demonstrated that there has always been enough food to feed every person in the world a nutritious diet, i.e. food scarcity is a myth. By harnessing the major grain crops for growing beef, pork and chicken, Americans were eating there own seed corn and that of other nations. Lappe first introduced Americans to eating low on the food chain by adopting a mostly plant diet. She systematically demonstrated that hunger exists only from misuse of the world’s resources that could easily feed everyone well.
E.F. Schumacher in his landmark book, Small Is Beautiful, examined the physics and economics of business systems and showed that maximum efficiency and employee satisfaction occurs in companies of 500 employees or less. He first wrote about “technology with a human face.” Today, so many decades down the road of human ingenuity run amuck, industrialized societies are looking around and asking how we recover our humanity while making a living.
Again, we must ask ourselves Lappe’s question: “How much is enough?”
Thomas Berry and Albert Schweitzer focused on the spiritual and moral dimensions of how we relate to each other and the Earth community. Berry took us on a rich journey to learn the traditions of cultures based on eco-principles and proposed that our hope resides in adopting similar values and practices. Schweitzer arrived at an “ethical basis for living” through thought: My will to live exists equally in every living thing and thus the path to a moral life is to live in concert with all other beings whether human or tree or four-legged.
These are the principles of the planet and our greatest thinkers came to them from varying paths but these principles have proven true from all perspectives.
This is just a reminder that the answers to the climate crisis and our social ills are embedded in the very same laws that govern the planet and every living creature on it.
My daughter on a recent hike with me along the Eastern Shore. We are best when we are in nature together. It restores our humanity and our hope.
Susan Feathers 