Mt. Sophia Ideas

William James was one of the founders of modern psychology, in addition to being an important philosopher and the brother of novelist Henry James.

In the first chapter of his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, he writes:

In the end, it had to come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots. (p. 34, in my edition; see here for an online edition)

He is, of course, using something Jesus said: A tree is known by its fruit. That is, you can tell what kind of person a person is, by observing how she or he lives.

The point William James is making is similar, though a little different. His point is that you know what something really is more by what it does, and the effects it has, than by studying “where it came from.” You know things more through their fruits than through their roots.

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Monday, you may know, is (or was, depending on when you read this), Labor Day here in America. What are the “roots” of Labor Day?

If you go to Wikipedia, you can read about them. Labor Day comes from a conflict between “Government” and “Labor,” in which employees of “Government” killed some members of “Labor,” and thus “Government” tried to appease “Labor” by creating a holiday for “them.”

But, you might ask, isn’t there already an international holiday for “Labor,” celebrated on May Day? Yes indeed, and this holiday is very important to communists. The “Government” didn’t want the American Labor Day to be associated with that, so they set American Labor Day to be celebrated in September.

Not exactly the best of roots for a holiday.

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But does anyone think about that stuff when they celebrate Labor Day today? What are Labor Day’s fruits?

Labor Day has become a final celebration to mark the end of summer and the beginning of a new school year (and a new sports season). Nobody thinks about it as a celebration of the division of society into the groups “Labor” and “Government,” or of the fact that the holiday started as copy of a communist holiday, just moved to a different date.

To condemn Labor Day because one thinks it has bad roots would be to ignore the good fruits it has come to have.

The same might be said for the question of the “roots” of the Christmas Tree and the dating of Christmas, the “roots” of saying “God bless you” to people who sneeze, the “roots” of engagement rings, and so on. Perhaps such things should be judged by their (actual) fruits in the present, rather than by their (actual or purported) roots in the past.

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If we tried to reject everything with questionable roots, we might find ourselves with nothing left to accept. We live in a flawed world, and everything, in some way or other, has something flawed in its history.

But that’s why one of our central missions is redemption; we “buy back” the things that the forces of misfortune and badness have taken — we, in our turn, take those things as occasions for making and doing good.

This is what we do when we donate money to disaster relief organizations, for example. A disaster is a situation that the forces of misfortune and badness have taken; but we “buy it back” (we redeem it) by using it as an occasion for doing good. We, in a small way, help to take the situation back for the forces of goodness.

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Now, we can’t redeem everything. Some things have such a flawed history that if we tried to take them up, we would end up producing bad fruit. Only God has the power to redeem such things, and our role is to pray that God does (and that we be available to help if and when God calls on us).

Other things, we could partially redeem — allowing them to produce good fruit — and yet they would continue to produce bad fruit as well. These things perhaps we should also leave alone — or rather, continually entrust to God to redeem (while remaining willing to join in the process of redemption should God call on us to do so).

But there are many things — perhaps more than most people realize — that we can redeem now with God’s help, turning them from things with damaged roots into things with good fruit. And Labor Day is one of those things.

So, my best wishes to you all as you help to redeem Labor Day by using it as an occasion for joy and goodness, and as you start the new school year!

-Micah Tillman

^{[Micah is a Mt. Sophia graduate who is working on his doctoral dissertation at The Catholic University of America. He also gets to teach philosophy (as a "teaching fellow"), which he loves.]}

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