Ethics of Habit

I'm reading an excellent book recommended to be by a former professor and friend. It is called "Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics." In it, Samuel Wells argues, among other things, that virtue is first and foremost not a matter of learning to follow "the rules," but of inhabiting a story and learning to live in consistency with that story. Christian ethics are to be completely unique from the ethics of the world because we inhabit a narrative which is taught and guarded by the church alone.

In order to learn to inhabit the story properly, we must undergo training just as any athlete or solder or academic must go through training in order to excel at their objective. This training is long, slow, and arduous; it takes decades, not minutes. To illustrate this Wells shares this story:

"One day in the late 1950's, in an Edinburgh hospital, a child died tragically on an operating table. Later that week, two friends were talking over the sad events. One of the friends expressed sympathy for the surgeon involved, since he had expected an unexpected complication. The other, a colleague of the surgeon, strongly disagreed, in these words:

I think the man is to blame. If anybody had handed me ether instead of chloroform I would have known from the weight that it was the wrong thing. You see, I know the man well. We were students together at Aberdeen, and he could have become one of the finest surgeons in Europe if only he had given his mind to it. But he didn't. He was more interested in golf. So he just used to do enough work to pass his examinations and no more. And that is how he has lived his life -- just enough to get through, but no more; so he has never picked up those seemingly peripheral bits of knowledge that can one day be crucial. The other day in that theater a bit of "peripheral" knowledge was crucial and he didn't have it. But it wasn't the other day that he failed -- it was thirty-nine years ago, when he only gave himself half-heartedly to medicine."

I think this is a profound observation about what it means to live a moral life. It is not about making heroic decisions in the heat of the moment. It is not about figuring out what would be the right thing to do in some hypothetical situation in which two conflicting goods or evils must be weighed. Living the moral life is becoming a certain sort of person out of which moral actions will naturally flow without much thought. It is about establishing habits during the seemingly mundane moments of life -- changing diapers, cooking, cleaning, working, walking, talking -- which form us into a person who can inhabit the story properly.

I confess I have forgotten this. I've lived as though I'm in a sprint instead of a marathon. I want to make this day count.