Letter #226: This One Weird Trick

Many experts, few masters.

Pops,

I can tell you made a big impression on Aristotle back in the day, because he actually responded to your concern about the golden mean in a passage at the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics. It might be my favorite thing he ever wrote. And he didn’t even credit you in so much as a lousy footnote. Jerk.

Anyway I like this passage so much, and I think it’s so important, that I spent some time yesterday getting into the Greek and translating the key sentences myself. Here’s what I came up with:

We’ll have said enough once we’ve made things as specific as the subject matter allows. We shouldn’t attempt the same degree of precision in every topic of discussion, any more than we should in every trade or craft.

Those two sentences contain a principle of almost infinite wisdom and limitless application. With this one weird trick you can cut through 90% of online sniping in just minutes.

Aristotle’s talking here about morality, which is our subject too. And he’s saying that some topics are inherently variable and unpredictable, so that we can only ever generalize about them. Trying to make things more definite in words than they actually are in reality makes your philosophy less true, not more. 

This is why—another genius point of Aristotle’s—young men can become experts in mathematics but not masters of politics. A 14-year-old with exhaustive knowledge of multivariate calculus is a prodigy. A 14-year-old who claims exhaustive knowledge of right and wrong is Greta Thunberg. You can grasp the quadratic equation once and never stop to question whether it’s right ever again. But moral truths get worn into the soul by wave after wave of experience and slow time. It’s impossible to capture them fully in words—they have to be lived.

You see this in the Talmud, which documents the kind of endless rabbinic waffling over minutiae in the Jewish law that has been going on since before Jesus’ day. You see it even—dare I say it—in the law itself, which contains provisions obviously designed to handle specific issues that never would have been mentioned unless they had happened to come up (what happens if two men are fighting and a woman tries to separate them, but she touches one of their private parts? I thought you’d never ask…). 

I love these sorts of discussions. Sometimes in the course of research I’ve spent hours lost in the Talmud, just relishing the companionable bickering, the flashes of dazzling ingenuity. But the Christian way, as I understand it, leads elsewhere. At the end of all the hair splitting and case law, standing in the midst of every dispute, is not a book of statues but a man of sorrows, whose life of love is the sum total and final word of all the law and the prophets. “Neither do I condemn thee. Go, and sin no more.” What more, after that, can be said?

Love,
Spencer