Balance is key to so many things in life. A balanced diet will keep us young, healthy and regular our doctors tell us. Psychologists say balance between work and family life leads to more productivity at work, more harmony and happiness at home and less stress all around. Balance is what keeps your airplane in the air and your car on the road. According to Plato, balance is even the very definition of Justice.
Plato says that society is driven by three complimentary and often competing natures; Basic Drive, Honor, and Reason. Each of these natures is essential to a functioning society and must be satisfied and in balance in order for Justice to exist within that society. Plato also suggests that this is not only true of society as a whole but it is true of the individual as well. As a lack of balance among these natures makes for an unjust and unhappy society, a lack of balance in a person makes for an unjust and unhappy person. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that Happiness is strongly linked to Justice-there's a possiblility they may actually be the same thing.
Over the next few weeks, I'll take a closer look at each of these Natures. I'll try to explain Plato's definition of each of them and I'll try to draw some conclusions as to why each is important to us as individuals and as a society. Then we'll be able to take a look at current situations within ourselves and within our society and try to understand how a lack of balance may have lead to these situations. I won't promise that this will be a completely linear process, however. There are many other things I'd like to explore and to write about. No matter how far I stray, however, I'll always get back around to this topic. Heck, understanding these ideas may be the key to understanding many of the other topics I'll be ranting on about.
Until next time, be safe, be free and be happy.
DW
24 April 2009
21 April 2009
The Three Meter Rule
This blog has been a long time coming. For years I've bored friends and family with my endless pontification on politics, religion, sociology and foot fungus. For some reason (many would say my incredible gift for doing nothing), I've never gotten around to putting any of this stuff in writing. Today that changes. So here goes:
I love to observe people in their natural habitat. I'm fascinated with how they interact with each other and what they think of themselves. That's why I watch judge shows. Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown, the People's Court-I love 'em all. Judge Mathis is my favorite, though. He always has some of the most interesting people with some of the most interesting problems. And they're always themselves. For the most part these folks are childish, petty and selfish. In short, they're human.
Watching the judge shows didn't teach me what has become one of the more interesting of human traits, though-one which I've since observed so often that I'm convinced it's more the rule than the exception. In fact I've given it a name-the three-foot rule with the three-meter corollary. I first learned of this phenomenon in the hallowed halls of Auburn University. Not, as you might expect, in a psychology or sociology class, but literally in the halls-of Haley Center-between classes.
For those of you not familiar with that fine educational institution on the plains of east Alabama, Haley Center is where the liberal arts department is housed and where most of the liberal arts classes are taught. Because Auburn's core curriculum requires a minimum number of liberal arts classes, this building is always packed to the rafters with underclassmen. It was often the only chance we engineering students had to rub elbows with mere mortals-and there was a lot of elbow rubbing. Navigating the hallways between classes was somewhat akin to pushing your way through a standing-room only crowd at a Pink Floyd concert, only without the cool music and pot-smoke in the air. Anyway, as this mass of humanity would squeeze through the too-small halls of academia, occasionally two young ladies who new each other would pass in opposite directions. When this happened, they would stop in the middle of the crowded hall, and hold up traffic to talk about important matters like how drunk they'd gotten at the lake over the past weekend or how drunk they were planning to get at the frat party this weekend, or whatever-heady stuff. Upon seeing each other they immediately became oblivious to everything outside the little three-foot sphere that encircled them. Thus the three foot rule.
After that I started to observe this tendency all over the place-people using push-to-talk cell phones in restaurants, groups of people, three abreast, strolling leisurely down the aisles of grocery stores, and people with small, screaming children in sit-down restaurants.
It was actually these parents who caused me to add the three meter corollary to the three foot rule (yes, I know the units don't match-sue me). For parents with small children, their bubble world extended out to encompass their children. Beyond that distance, they, like the Auburn co-eds, were oblivious to the rest of the world. Later I noticed a tendency for parents to let their small children run all over public places like grocery stores and restaurants getting in the way of and irritating the socially responsible among us. I should have modified the name of the rule to cover this, but the name sounded good as it was and, as I hinted at above, I'm kind of lazy.
I'll end tonight with a story which vividly illustrates the three-meter corollary. I decided to go to college somewhat later in life. By my final semester at Auburn I had somehow acquired a matching set of dependents consisting of a wife and an eight-year-old son. My wife had taken a job near Birmingham and was staying with her parents while I finished up my education. We only saw each other on the weekends, and then not every weekend. On this particular Friday night I had driven up from Auburn and we had decided to have a nice, and what we thought would be a quiet, dinner at a new restaurant in town. Alas, it was not to be. We were seated near a couple of three-meter types with a small son somewhere between the ages of two and Satan. The kid had decided to use the booster seat he should have been sitting in as a ram in his own little demolition derby. My wife's chair turned out to be his biggest competition. After about ten minutes of watching this kid play peekaboo with the ladies room door and bang his booster seat into my wife's chair I asked the parents of the child, who were attentively nursing their after-dinner cocktails, to please get their child under control. By the mother's reaction, you'd have thought I'd slapped her and called her a sodomite. The father, however, made the child sit down, and shortly they left, but not before speculating with each other, not so quietly, about my paternity. Had I not had the satisfaction of having the three-meter corollary of my three-foot rule proven, it would have been a very bad night indeed. My wife wasn't quite as excited to have my rule validated.
Until next time keep an eye out for the three-footers and have fun.
DW
I love to observe people in their natural habitat. I'm fascinated with how they interact with each other and what they think of themselves. That's why I watch judge shows. Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown, the People's Court-I love 'em all. Judge Mathis is my favorite, though. He always has some of the most interesting people with some of the most interesting problems. And they're always themselves. For the most part these folks are childish, petty and selfish. In short, they're human.
Watching the judge shows didn't teach me what has become one of the more interesting of human traits, though-one which I've since observed so often that I'm convinced it's more the rule than the exception. In fact I've given it a name-the three-foot rule with the three-meter corollary. I first learned of this phenomenon in the hallowed halls of Auburn University. Not, as you might expect, in a psychology or sociology class, but literally in the halls-of Haley Center-between classes.
For those of you not familiar with that fine educational institution on the plains of east Alabama, Haley Center is where the liberal arts department is housed and where most of the liberal arts classes are taught. Because Auburn's core curriculum requires a minimum number of liberal arts classes, this building is always packed to the rafters with underclassmen. It was often the only chance we engineering students had to rub elbows with mere mortals-and there was a lot of elbow rubbing. Navigating the hallways between classes was somewhat akin to pushing your way through a standing-room only crowd at a Pink Floyd concert, only without the cool music and pot-smoke in the air. Anyway, as this mass of humanity would squeeze through the too-small halls of academia, occasionally two young ladies who new each other would pass in opposite directions. When this happened, they would stop in the middle of the crowded hall, and hold up traffic to talk about important matters like how drunk they'd gotten at the lake over the past weekend or how drunk they were planning to get at the frat party this weekend, or whatever-heady stuff. Upon seeing each other they immediately became oblivious to everything outside the little three-foot sphere that encircled them. Thus the three foot rule.
After that I started to observe this tendency all over the place-people using push-to-talk cell phones in restaurants, groups of people, three abreast, strolling leisurely down the aisles of grocery stores, and people with small, screaming children in sit-down restaurants.
It was actually these parents who caused me to add the three meter corollary to the three foot rule (yes, I know the units don't match-sue me). For parents with small children, their bubble world extended out to encompass their children. Beyond that distance, they, like the Auburn co-eds, were oblivious to the rest of the world. Later I noticed a tendency for parents to let their small children run all over public places like grocery stores and restaurants getting in the way of and irritating the socially responsible among us. I should have modified the name of the rule to cover this, but the name sounded good as it was and, as I hinted at above, I'm kind of lazy.
I'll end tonight with a story which vividly illustrates the three-meter corollary. I decided to go to college somewhat later in life. By my final semester at Auburn I had somehow acquired a matching set of dependents consisting of a wife and an eight-year-old son. My wife had taken a job near Birmingham and was staying with her parents while I finished up my education. We only saw each other on the weekends, and then not every weekend. On this particular Friday night I had driven up from Auburn and we had decided to have a nice, and what we thought would be a quiet, dinner at a new restaurant in town. Alas, it was not to be. We were seated near a couple of three-meter types with a small son somewhere between the ages of two and Satan. The kid had decided to use the booster seat he should have been sitting in as a ram in his own little demolition derby. My wife's chair turned out to be his biggest competition. After about ten minutes of watching this kid play peekaboo with the ladies room door and bang his booster seat into my wife's chair I asked the parents of the child, who were attentively nursing their after-dinner cocktails, to please get their child under control. By the mother's reaction, you'd have thought I'd slapped her and called her a sodomite. The father, however, made the child sit down, and shortly they left, but not before speculating with each other, not so quietly, about my paternity. Had I not had the satisfaction of having the three-meter corollary of my three-foot rule proven, it would have been a very bad night indeed. My wife wasn't quite as excited to have my rule validated.
Until next time keep an eye out for the three-footers and have fun.
DW
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