The School of Hard Knocks

There is a widening chasm between what we teach and what we do. In the medical field, research suggests that student nurses often struggle to bridge the gap between the “theory” of the nursing school and the “practice” of the hospital ward. They find it difficult to synthesize textbook definitions with the chaotic reality of a patient in crisis.

This theory/practice gap isn’t unique to nursing. It besets social work, education, psychology, and law enforcement. One way to close this gap is to change the environment: have nursing instructors abandon the lecture hall and move training to the wards on day one. To solve a similar problem in the humanities, students of ethics should perhaps begin their studies in homeless shelters, with street gangs, or in war zones.

The very word “ethics” has become synonymous with “ivory tower” thinking. We imagine scholars surrounded by books and pipe smoke, orating on esoteric concepts that have as much to do with the hard-scrabble world as astronomic cosmology has to do with making a peanut butter sandwich. In our materially-minded society, “ethics” has come to mean irrelevant theory, much like “rhetoric” has come to mean empty speech. Their arguments are often dismissed as mere casuistry — moral hair-splitting that fails to connect with practical survival.

In the academic field of ethics, I am a nobody. I hold no advanced degrees and I do not walk the hallowed halls of academia. I am a carpenter. My hands are calloused and rough. I rise in the dark to read, study, and write before I spend my day framing houses and repairing the homes of others. My attention is constantly split between the physical strain of labor and the inner, more pressing lines of thought.

But I am also uniquely qualified to discuss how one should live.

I grew up in Chad and the Central African Republic, living under tyrants ruling over failed states. In those places, there was often no law — or rather, the law was whoever held the biggest gun. I have known abject poverty, famine, imprisonment, and the cold weight of a death threat. I have watched my father be led away to an execution he narrowly escaped; later, I found myself in the back of a lorry, headed for my own. We escaped with nothing but the clothes on our backs.

I have worked alongside gangs, mixed martial artists, Marines, and loggers. Trust me when I say: the ethics I propose are anything but ivory tower musings. They are the tools I have used to move forward in a brutal world where most people seek only their own gain, and where violence is a routine event.

I don’t want to leave my children and grandchildren with a map they can’t read or a truth they can’t weaponize. In a world where violence is routine, ethics shouldn’t be a luxury for the hallowed halls of academia — it should be a tool kit for survival. I want to leave them with instruction that leads immediately to mission. Not just words, but works.