All the Small Things

Ethics for the Other.

Image: Blink-182, kerrang.com

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I often walk my dogs near the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University. It oversees three parks where my dogs hunt for discarded pizza crust and the rare chicken bone (finger sweep moment) while taking needed breaks with random dog lovers, like the clarinet and sax players loving my dogs.

They asked what I had on. “Blink 182,” I told them, “‘All the Small Things’.” I played it for them. It didn’t go well. Disdain colored their faces. Phrases like “shallow frat boy pop punk” were said. I wasn’t having it. My unapologetic lecture surprised them. They did not know that four lines from “All the Small Things” upend much of Western philosophy.

The song begins:

All the small things

True care, truth brings

In equating care with truth, Blink 182 walks right by a 2,500-year-old discussion triggered by the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates’ question: “What is justice?” No philosopher has had a sufficient answer for it since. Some thought they did, and while many have been insightful, none have been sufficient. Philosophers are still discussing and hoping to discover what makes justice justice. Blink 182 doesn’t want for this question and the abstract answer for which it hungers.

Instead, the first two lines concern an important alternative question, “What are my obligations to you?” Care for others is about being helpful and about our obligations to others. Someone calls you at 3 A.M. in crisis. They need you now. You have an 8:00 a.m. interview for a job, a lifeline you’ve been without for some time. Sleep matters. What are your obligations? Does it depend on the caller for help? Is it your child, spouse, parent, sibling, best friend, etc.? The answer hinges on indeterminate variables. Obligations vary from person to person, time to time, and place to place. They are often unplanned. The other’s needs may surprise while demanding one’s readiness to fulfill them. This happens to us all.

Our bonds are normally about the small things, like showing up for family or a friend, cleaning up your mess or cleaning up a mess you didn’t make, saying hello to a stranger in the street, holding the door open, “after you,” driving someone at the last minute somewhere when their transportation falls through. We live in virtue of others. Nothing about our care for the other is abstract.

Imagine if we changed the word ‘moral’ with the word ‘helpful’ and supplanted the word ‘immoral’ with the word ‘unhelpful.’ “What is morality?” invites a different kind of answer than “How may I be helpful?” The answer to the former will be abstract, unchanging, and general. The answer to the latter is always for a specific person at a specific time in a specific place. In the initial two lines, Blink 182 implies that ethics are something we perform; they’re about helping. Ethics is not some set of conceptual principles but rather a set of entirely concrete.

The nature of truth, the first question, directs you to know what something is, whereas the second question, the nature of ethics, turns you to ‘know how to help’ either another or yourself. While the answer to what is truth may be abstract, when it comes to morality, helping is in the world. First and foremost, it requires one to listen for directions.

Later in the song, Blink 182 drives this home when singing:

Late night, come home

Work sucks, I know

She left me roses by the stairs

Surprises let me know she cares

Blink 182 understands that performing “All the Small Things” for others helps create community and artistry that has no end. It is reminiscent of the 20th-century prophetic philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel, who understood the need to fixate on the small things in our never-ending work of creating community. Heschel declared: “The question isn’t to be or not to be. But how to be.”

Image: Abraham Joshua Heschel, iaujc.org

Ethics is about how to be for you. My response for you is first triggered when encountering or intersecting with you. It’s now up to me to focus on how to be for you, not just to you. The act of leaving flowers ‘for’ you at the bottom of the stairs, an acknowledgment of our interconnection, and the clear hope to brighten yours, is an act for you.

Like Heschel, Blink 182 is focused on normative ethics, that is, how to be ethical, instead of focusing on metaphysical ethics where one is answering that ancient Greek Platonic question, “What are ethics?” We must partake of this truth for Plato's Socrates while ethically performing for the other. Blink 182 echoes traces of Heschel in sidestepping this question with a responsive concern for the other. They note that morals are not an unchanging definition reducible to an abstract metaphysic underlying all matters of justice, but rather that the needs of the other are your ethical director.

In the same way that a doctor is guided by the needs of a patient who has a particular illness and a personal medical history, a teacher is guided by the specific confusion in a given lesson and the learning style of a singular student or a parent responding to the needs of a child at their own level of development of their own unique self, so, too, all of us must respond to the call of the other in their lived context. The ethic that Blink 182 joins Heschel in bringing us to requires us to merge worlds at the intersection of lives.

Are you ready for the unplanned signal for help? Are you ready to respond for your friends, loved ones, and the strangers you encounter? While the occasional need is profound, many others require only a small thing, maybe leaving flowers in an ordinary moment. Encountering another triggers your opportunity to be caring/helpful, and it often happens in the blink of an eye.