Slower & Simpler - Honesty

Honesty

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Honesty refers to a facet of moral character and connotes positive and virtuous attributes such as integrity, truthfulness, and straightforwardness, including straightforwardness of conduct, along with the absence of lying, cheating, theft, etc. Furthermore, honesty means being trustworthy, loyal, fair, and sincere.

 

 

Yes, I'm still on the honesty kick.  So now that we've defined it, what does it have to do with slower and simpler?  I guess that I automatically equate them.  Living a slower, simpler and thoughtful life automatically incorporates honesty.  Am I being naïve??

 

At the risk of being esoteric, I'm going to share an essay series by a task force at Stanford: Endangered Virtues, with articles on not only honesty but other virtues. 

 

http://www.hoover.org/taskforces/virtues/endangered-virtues

 

The Endangered Virtues essay series is an online volume, written by members of Hoover’s Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force on Virtues of a Free Society that rests on several shared convictions: that the American constitutional tradition is a source of wisdom about the mutual dependence of liberty and virtue and the tension between them; that the tradition places primary responsibility for the cultivation of the virtues on which liberty depends not on government but on the institutions of civil society, particularly the family and faith but also on education, work, and civic life; that in recent decades and owing to a variety of causes—social, cultural, economic, and political—those virtues and the sources that sustain have been exposed to danger and are weakening; and that renewing the virtues and the sources that sustain them is an urgent task.

 

Why am I harping on this?  If we don't get back to the basics, our society will not last. I'm concerned to the very core of my being. We could be teaching the virtues in our schools - are we??