by Rushworth M. Kidder

If ever a year needed New Year’s resolutions, it’s 2012. I’ll get to mine — and yours — in a minute. First, a word about the auld lang syne we’ve just come through.

The year 2011 was strident and unsettled. Its economy spluttered and its social fabric frayed. Protests broke out in England, Russia, the Arab world, and Wall Street. Politics hardened into inertia and paralysis. Even educational institutions, at least in the United States, seemed unwilling to address deep-rooted challenges of cheating and sexual predation.

Yet 2011 was also a year of promise. Markets slowly gained ground. Libya and Tunisia are now on upward trajectories, and the war in Iraq has (at least officially) concluded. The rancid politics of deliberate obstructionism increasingly are repudiated by voters. And the public is realizing that education can’t simply be outsourced to professionals but must be an obligation of the whole culture, all the time.

In hindsight, then, 2011 felt like a massive modern symphony alternating between deliberate anguish and exquisite harmony, whose composer was magnificent but whose conductor never showed up. The players were skilled musicians with excellent instruments, but they never quite got it together. By the middle of the piece, the brass section was eight bars ahead of the strings, who were five bars beyond the woodwinds. By the time the strings resolved a dissonance and landed on a ringing, powerful chord, the winds were still hung up on the previous inharmony — while the brasses had finished the great sonority and were haring off toward the next tumultuous passage.

Why? Each player, sticking doggedly to the score, was convinced of his or her own rightness. Individually, they performed brilliantly, but the result was a wretched cacophony. Nobody had the moral courage to say, “Stop! Let’s take it again, from the top of page 7.” Nobody, in other words, was really listening. And when the piece suddenly ended — at midnight on December 31 — nothing had been truly resolved.

So my New Year’s resolutions start with rethinking the word “resolution.” This time of year, the word means moral commitment, a promise to oneself about noble intentions. According to my 1913 Webster’s, the word is derived from the Latin word solvere, meaning to loosen or dissolve — a helpful point in a year of log-jams, stuck-tight arguments, and immoveable objects. It apparently has its roots in alchemy, where it meant the act of separating a compound into its elements or component parts. From there it came to mean the act of analyzing a complex notion.

In this New Year, then, I’m committed to resolving things more carefully. It seems 2012 needs from us more clarity, more analytical ability to look hard at the tough issues and see exactly how they’re made. In this artwork we call our life, 2012 needs us to listen harder so we can separate creative tensions from mere mistakes.

But analysis isn’t enough. Resolution also means “solving a vexed question or difficult problem.” It’s the ability to find answers to puzzles, explain seeming paradoxes, and come to agreement about dilemmas and conundrums. We spent a lot of 2011 arguing noisily about why things were the way they were. The 2012 mindset has to be about solutions — and re-solutions.

Once a thing is solved, resolution takes on still another meaning as the state of being resolved, settled, or determined, as by a formal vote in a legislative resolution. I’m resolved, then, to make 2012 a year of conclusiveness. For no one thing will 2012 reward us more than for the moral courage to say, “Stop! We’ve reached agreement, and this issue is settled. Now let’s move on.” The human attributes that give us resolve, says Webster’s, are firmness, steadiness, constancy, and determination. After a year of flabbiness of commitment and instability of purpose, this sort of resolve — the willingness to speak up, stand up, and stay the course — will be crucial to success in 2012.

Finally, of course, resolution refers to the visual arts and to music — the fine detail that can be distinguished in an image (as in high-resolution computer screens) or the resolution of dissonance into harmony by (Webster’s again) the rising or falling of the note which makes the discord. In 2012, I’m resolved to see sharp-edged distinctions despite the world’s blur. And I’m resolved to follow the score more carefully, count the bars, and raise or lower the pitch of my own intentions to bring out real harmony.

And your resolutions? Here at IGE, we’d like you to join us in a moral commitment to greater participation. We need you to help us resolve — that is, analyze — the ethical issues of the world. From time to time, beginning today, we’ll seek your opinions through brief surveys like the one below. Granted, this is no random sample: Readers of Ethics Newsline® already have a point of view about the importance of ethics and integrity, but there’s real power in the collective expression of those views. So let us hear from you, and let us report back the results. Here’s today’s question:

In my view, the participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement are individuals who reflect (choose one):

a. The broadly held views of a majority, properly rooted in legitimate concerns

b. The broadly held views of a majority, mistakenly rooted in unfounded and extreme criticisms

c. The narrow views of a small minority, nevertheless properly rooted in legitimate concerns

d. The narrow views of a small minority, mistakenly rooted in unfounded and extreme criticisms

To respond, click . And thanks for making 2012 a year of resolution, in all its meanings.

©2012 Institute for Global Ethics

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