Fables were part of the moral fabric when I was growing up. Perhaps yours as well. Especially some of Aesop’s Fables. (Yet, I was suprised that this was not the case for many of my middle school students, when a public school teacher.)
There’s one fable, in particular, which social psychologist Jonathan Haidt discussed in a 2012 interview (noted below) about his latest book (at that time): Aesop’s The Ant and the Grasshopper.
• Read.gov > The Aesop for Children (public domain) > The Ants & the Grasshopper
One bright day in late autumn a family of Ants were bustling about in the warm sunshine, drying out the grain they had stored up during the summer, when a starving Grasshopper, his fiddle under his arm, came up and humbly begged for a bite to eat.
“What!” cried the Ants in surprise, “haven’t you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer?”
“I didn’t have time to store up any food,” whined the Grasshopper; “I was so busy making music that before I knew it the summer was gone.”
The Ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust.
“Making music, were you?” they cried. “Very well; now dance!” And they turned their backs on the Grasshopper and went on with their work.
What’s your takeaway? Is this fable a moral Rorschach test for society? A Kobayashi Maru exercise for public policies & programs, and judicial rulings? (Like the intractable housing & homelessness crisis in some major cities?)
• billmoyers.com > “Encore: How Do Conservatives and Liberals See the World?” (June 1, 2012) – Politics is really religion. Politics is about sacredness.
JONATHAN HAIDT: This is a perfect example of what the culture war has turned into. It’s a battle over ideas about fairness versus compassion. So the reason that that video [an excerpt from an early Republican debate – at that time – where Wolf Blitzer asks Ron Paul a question regarding someone opting out of paying for health insurance] went viral is because of the applause at the end.
So I got sent this video by a lot of people … But it’s exactly Aesop’s ant and the grasshopper. The grasshopper fiddles away all the summer while the ants are working and working and working, preparing for the winter. …
… So what they’re [most Americans are] applauding for there and what they’re saying, “Yeah, let him [the grasshopper] die,” the reason they’re saying that is because they want a world in which karma functions. This guy made a choice. He made a choice to be a free rider [a lazy person]. He made a choice to not buy health insurance. And if karma works as it should, no one will pay for it and he will die. Now, if you care, if you value the care foundation, that is extremely cold. But if you value fairness as proportionality, that’s what has to happen.
• Haidt, Jonathan (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. [2]
Epigraph: I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them. – Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus [Political Treatise], 1676 [3]
PART I Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reasoning Second
1 Where Does Morality Come From?
2 The Intuitive Dog and Its Rational Tail
3 Elephants Rule
4 Vote for Me (Here’s Why)PART II There’s More to Morality than Harm and Fairness
5 Beyond WEIRD Morality
6 Taste Buds of the Righteous Mind
7 The Moral Foundations of Politics
8 The Conservative AdvantagePART III Morality Binds and Blinds
9 Why Are We So Groupish?
10 The Hive Switch
11 Religion Is a Team Sport
12 Can’t We All Disagree More Constructively?
Notes
[1] Fables can be quite brief. Jean de la Fontaine’s poem “The Cicada and the Ant” is just 22 lines.
• Wiki > The Ant and the Grasshopper
La Fontaine follows ancient sources in his 17th-century retelling of the fable … The readers of his time were aware of the Christian duty of charity and therefore sensed the moral ambiguity of the fable.
The fable has equally been pressed into service in the debate over the artist’s place within the work ethic.
[2] Wiki > Moral foundations theory [list subject to addition, subtraction, or modification]
- Care/Harm
- Fairness/Cheating
- Loyalty/Betrayal
- Authority/Subversion
- Sanctity/Degradation
- Liberty/Oppression.
[3] Wiki > Spinoza > Legacy
Albert Einstein named Spinoza as the philosopher who exerted the most influence on his world view (Weltanschauung). Spinoza equated God (infinite substance) with Nature, consistent with Einstein’s belief in an impersonal deity. In 1929, Einstein was asked in a telegram by Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein whether he believed in God. Einstein responded by telegram: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.” Einstein wrote the preface to a biography of Spinoza, published in 1946.