Goldstein was pulled over by the police one night around two in the morning. After checking over his ID and noting his advanced age, the policeman asked Goldstein exactly where he was headed at that time of night. Goldstein replied, “I am on my way to a lecture about the abuses of alcohol, its toxic impact on the human body, and the harmful side effects of smoking and late nights.” The officer responded, “Really? And who exactly is giving that lecture at this time of night?” To which Goldstein replied, “Mrs. Goldstein.”
Our world, broadly speaking, may be divided in two: the world as it is, and the world as it could or should be. Take any issue, whether it’s global, like the environment, or personal, like how we treat our bodies. There is the descriptive, the state of affairs on the ground, and there is the prescriptive, the unrealized condition of how things “ought” to be. On one side is how Mr. Goldstein behaves, and on the other is how Mrs. Goldstein tells him he should behave. In philosophic terms it is what John Dewey identified as the gap between the real and the ideal. The most interesting element is not the recognition of the two worlds, and not even the awareness of the discrepancy between them – that who or where we are is not who and where we should be. The most interesting part is the interplay between the two – in other words, that Mr. Goldstein has chosen to come home at all! He knows what he is doing, he knows what his missus is going to say, he knows they are not one and the same thing, and yet embedded in him must be not only a moral compass to show him the way home, but a gravitational pull that brings him there every night even if he knows that upon walking in the door he will only be reminded of how he has fallen short. A combination of guilt and loyalty tugs at him, and maybe an unspoken hope that while he knows he falls short and may even continue to do so, he can always come home and one day perhaps that gap will narrow, and who he is and who he knows he can be will one day become one and the same.
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