Doing The Right Thing

from "Living Life Well"

A brief version of this article first appeared in The Kenwood Press July 1st, 2026.

Once, when I was young, I asked my grandfather why we called China the Far East when it lay west of us here in California. He chuckled and said, “That is a mystery to contemplate, not one to solve.”

Rudyard Kipling wrote, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” but Carl Jung disagreed. For him, the meeting of opposites was not only possible but essential. Healing— whole-making— does not come from abolishing differences, nor from one side surrendering to the other. It comes from holding the tension until something greater can take place.

When the archetypal snake bites its tail, the entire snake becomes complete, and present. Yin and yang are brought together as the Tao, the One that gives rise to duality while surpassing it. Doing the right thing is less about choosing sides and more about how we come to life in the space between them.

This is never easy. What appears as opposition is better considered a partnership within a greater whole. That greater perspective is suggested by the very word “consideration” itself, for its Latin root, considerare, invokes viewing things in terms of the stars overhead. To consider, then, is not merely to think longer and harder; it is to orient ourselves within a larger frame of reference before thinking about what things might mean. Otherwise, we become superficial.

Superficiality is not just shallow; it is reactive. It happens when the meaning of things becomes lost in some arbitrary opinion about them. The superficial mind cannot tolerate ambiguity, and so it dismisses significant complexities to embrace simplistic certainties. Research on intolerance of ambiguity has long linked this sort of rigidity with authoritarian tendencies and arbitrary judgments that treat complications as dangerous, rather than intriguing.

Each of my eyes sees a slightly different version of the room that I am in. If I close either eye, the image remains clear— but something essential is lost. It is only by opening both eyes that depth appears. What neither eye can perceive alone emerges naturally through their collaboration. So it is with conflict: when we close one eye for the sake of certainty, we lose the very depth needed in deciding what is right. There is that galvanizing moment when, in studying a foreign language, the tedious memorization of vocabulary and the parsing of verb forms give way to becoming fluent and thinking in a way that was once foreign.

Living with the ambiguous, without reducing it to the tangible, asks us to develop sea legs. We feel the sailboat ride the waves, constantly lifting and settling, and we keep shifting the set of the sail to catch the vagaries of the wind. Meanwhile, above and beyond all this activity, a single guiding star keeps its steady place and is always right there when we look up. And all the while we are breathing hard, filling our lungs with the air that surrounds us, and emptying our breath back out into the wind.

Morality involves a fundamental orientation toward what is worthy— the guiding star by which we steer. Ethics involves the minute-by-minute adjustments that we must make as circumstances change, if we are to remain true to our orientation. Morality gives us our bearings so that we may proceed ethically, and not get lost in the journey; instead, we find ourselves there.

Right action— doing the right thing— asks us to leave our habitual preferences behind and to undertake a journey through three distinct realms: ambiguity, liminality, and ineffability.

Ambiguity is the first threshold, when we realize we can no longer assume that things are simply straightforward. For most people, ambiguity provokes anxiety and a fear of the dark. It deprives the fragile ego of the convenience of certainty. Yet with ambiguity, depth begins to open, and growth starts with the exercise of courage and curiosity about the unknown.

If ambiguity can be endured, liminality can follow. Liminality is the crossroads where old coordinates have been left behind, though new ones have not yet formed. One stands, as it were, between east and west, between right and wrong, between familiar territory and terra incognita— the undiscovered country. Jung understood psychic change in just this way: as a dialectical interval in which opposing contents are held in tension until they at last combine, causing something new to emerge.

Then, the ineffable becomes present, and available. This is not meant as something vague or sentimental, but as a galvanizing event within that space— one that cannot be reduced to either side of the conflict, to either ditch on each side of the road, but instead to how the road opens ahead. What had been a deadlock becomes a disclosure. Jung called this the transcendent function: a movement beyond the polarity of right and wrong in order to encounter and know what is true.

Holding tension until something new emerges is not only a psychological process. It appears in the consulting room, in public life, and in the soul of a nation. In working with contentious couples, I urge them to set aside their rancor and enter into their conflict as something to explore rather than to debate. The difference is the distinction between football and a concert. In playing football, points are scored against the opponent; in a concert, the score is the music played to harmonize with others. The question shifts from “Who will win?” to “What is emerging between us?”

The same contrast between opposition and collaboration appears in politics. A town hall meeting is, at its best, an arena of ambiguity. Many voices speak, and no individual perspective is given authority. The community hears and bears the tension of a diverse plurality until a resolving consensus is reached. A rally, on the other hand, provides the opposite as voices echo a single chant with one voice, one opinion, and one decision. The former requires mindful consideration, while the latter brings about a more spontaneous reaction. Democracy depends upon the citizens’ capacity to endure ambiguity; authoritarianism feeds on the hunger to escape it.

So doing what is right is not a matter of choosing the winning side. It is a matter of learning how to be where you are, to know your bearings, and to resist the temptation of any premature certainty. My grandfather knew the question was never whether China was east or west of California. The question was whether I could understand that my attitude is established by my point of view, and that my sense of direction depends entirely upon where I stand. Doing the right thing is not what you decide to do, it’s about how you decide.

Pope Leo’s warning about the dignity of the human person in an age of artificial intelligence brings this ancient drama of east and west, right and wrong, into our own time. The danger is not simply that machines will become more powerful, but that human beings will become more mechanical. The more we outsource our judgment to algorithms, the more we risk surrendering the slow, interior work of ambiguity, liminality, and ineffability to systems built for speed, efficiency, and prediction— rather than for wonder, contemplation, and understanding.

Artificial intelligence excels at narrowing possibilities, compressing the unknown into probabilities and rankings. It digitizes what had been analog, observing the rise and fall of particles without recognizing the wave that they manifest. It can approximate our preferences and simulate our speech, but it cannot pass through the stages that make ethical life human. It does not lie awake in ambiguity, stand in the doorway of liminality, or receive ineffable meanings that alter the soul. It does not suffer the tension of opposites. It simply optimizes. It simulates human activity without experiencing it. The more we imitate it, the less capable we become of doing what is right, because doing what is right requires more than calculation. It requires the courage to remain present where no calculation suffices.

That courage is under assault from another direction as well. In the figure of Donald Trump, America is faced not with a polarity to be integrated, but with a pattern of fragmentation. Trump’s appeal does not lie in any coherent vision of wholeness, but rather in the distractions of jarring non sequiturs meant to entertain and confound. It lies in the promise to relieve the burden of ambiguity by dividing the world into loyalists and enemies, winners and losers, “real” people and disposable others. His rhetoric offers the false comfort of certainty and the false purity of grievance. It encourages a kind of moral dissociation in which inconvenient facts and unwelcome neighbors can simply be driven away.

Here the snake does not bite its tail— it tears itself apart. When such a figure is treated as just one more pole in a healthy polarity, something important is misunderstood. A true polarity involves two partial truths that seek a larger synthesis. Fragmentation, by contrast, is a refusal of synthesis. It is not a voice in the conversation, but an attack on the conversation itself. To fold that attack into a comforting narrative of “both sides” is another way of fleeing ambiguity rather than enduring it.

Doing what is right in such a time cannot mean merely balancing Trump against his opponents, nor can it mean simply trusting the outputs of artificial systems that mirror existing biases too quickly. It must mean recovering the slower, more demanding discipline of consideration: lifting our eyes, as the old etymology suggests, to the constellations by which we steer. It means asking, in each circumstance, not only “What do I want?” or “What does my side demand?” but “What larger wholeness is at stake here, and am I willing to stand in the tension long enough to see it show itself?”

The work of ethics is not finished when rules have been consulted or when the direction of the crowd has been checked. These may be starting points, but the deeper question that remains is the one my grandfather quietly placed before me: will the world be treated as a puzzle to be solved, or as a mystery to be contemplated? A puzzle yields to clever technique; a mystery requires courageous presence. Puzzles can be solved by machines; mysteries— so far— cannot.

Doing what is right belongs to the realm of mystery. It asks of us the humility to admit how little we know, the patience to remain in the in-between, and the faith that something wiser than our first reaction may be born if only we do not rush to be done. In a culture that prizes speed, certainty, and victory, doing this kind of right thing may be the most subversive action we can take.

Morality offers that reliable guiding star by which we orient ourselves, while ethics is the continual act of adjusting our course regarding it. Doing the right thing is, after all, less about what we decide than it is about how consciously we arrive at that decision. It asks that we open both eyes, use both hands, and— rather than debating right and wrong— that we recognize what is simply true.