Current mood:	moody
Entry tags:	books, jane addams

Persistent humility
A few weeks back, I was looking for books at the library and happened to pick up Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy. As soon as I started it I realized it was the perfect book for me to pick up. It focuses on Addams's early life and intellectual and moral development, including her path to and choice of her life's work in 1889 (when she was 29), and her continued development as an active citizen after that. It's hard for me to express how meaningful my experience of reading the book has been, and I think will continue to be. It carries the strong message that by continued persistence in thought and action, we can do great things, and that stumbling in the process sometimes does not mean the process is over or will have no good result.

There were two observations that her biographer made about her approach to thinking and life that particularly struck a chord in me.

...the non-resistant philosophy she had tred to practice at Hull House consisted of "selecting the good in the neighborhood and refraining from railing at the bad."

The sustained moral practice to which she was aspiring was enigmatic: to live out her beliefs firmly and at the same time find the humility needed to avoid the pitfall of self-righteousness.

Hull Hous was in the Nineteenth Ward of Chicago, which was a terribly poor place, in which the streets couldn't be seen for piles of garbage, because the representative of the ward gave the garbage contracts to friends and didn't check up on them. It sounds somewhat ridiculous to say that she didn't rail against such conditions. But she did do something about them, and her action was probably all the better conceived for the fact that she assessed the situation accurately and patiently rather than angrily, and moved forward with a plan to abate it.

I have a tendency to rail against the bad, and based on my experience I can't say it's ultimately very productive. I think this quotation particularly resonated with me in the context of one of my 101 in 1001 goals - #41, which is about changing my reaction to people cycling on the sidewalk. It's a minor annoyance compared to walking in garbage-strewn streets every day, yet I can't witness the situation without getting angry (and sometimes railing). Addams avoided railing where she could, yet continued to be active in working to eradicate the bad things around her. I admire the philosophy that she operated under -- a philosophy which took her not only from her background as a woman of privilege to a civic reform leader at Hull House, but from there to labor reform, peace activism and lobbying for women's suffrage.

As Addams took steps in the 1890s that led her more deeply into the complicated, sometimes murky woods of democracy, she repeatedly tried to analyze and understand her often perplexing, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes deeply disturbing experiences. Aided by books, innumerable conversations, and her own writing, she studied those experiences not for an hour or an afternoon but for weeks and months and years, walking around them to see them from all sides, writing and revising her thought about them, and generally behaving more like an intellectual bulldog than a genteel lady who wore her learing lightly. It was this persistent rethinking, and not only the experiences, that produced her profoundest insights and taught her the most about her class, her gender, herself.

This paragraph makes clear that Addams' education was essential to her success, both by giving her ideas to work with, and by teaching her to think deeply. I feel like I got the same kind of good education, but so far I haven't taken it to the kind of deep level she got to. And she didn't get there by magic, but by persistent thinking and reassessing. I feel like I haven't often tried to apply that kind of deep persistence, because I'm used to succeeding "enough" without needing to put forth that much effort. But it's the kind of persistence required to do anything that's truly difficult, and a lot of worthwhile things are truly difficult.

I'd like to do something worthwhile, like Jane Addams did. And I think, and hope, that recalling her example will be inspiring to me in trying to do that. What "that" is, I don't know yet. Luckily, her story also shows that uncertainty and stumbling don't preclude a positive result.