The Ethics of Ethos

If you read last week's column, you probably read the last sentence as a rhetorical question.  After discussing Franklin's leveraging of his positive image in France, I asked, "Can we blame him?"

The answer to this question, however, is not as easy as it might seem.

As I tried to show in that column, Franklin was way ahead of the Sprite marketers, who tell us, "Image is everything." In the tradition of Greek oratory, he capitalized on his ethos--or, at least, the French people's perception of it--to win over his audience. Philosophically, we would be right to interrogate this approach to image.  After all, image and reality can be two different things.  We have a word for a mismatch of sign and reality: lie.  Was Franklin lying by playing up an image?

Well, technically, we might make a distinction between actively lying and allowing someone to believe an untruth, but either action is in conflict with truth and deserves interrogation.  How do we feel about Franklin's leveraging of his image in France?

As you may have guessed by now, I'm on Team Franklin.  (Some would probably argue I'm captain of the team.)  Still, I'm willing to call a foul when I see one.  After all, I consider myself a very honest person, as well as an objective one.

Pretending that he was straight out of the backwoods would have been at least misleading, if not openly deceitful, but I don't recall seeing any accounts of Franklin's making this claim.  Wearing the fur cap for which he became famous comes close to putting on a false show, and I'm not sure that I personally would have felt comfortable with that form of attire if I, like Franklin, had spent most of my life in cities such as Boston (where he grew up), Philadelphia (where he became a leading citizen), and London (where he worked as a printer and later as a diplomat).  Still, to be fair, Franklin might argue, were he with us here today, that he was embracing and celebrating an authentic part of American identity.  I'm reminded of all the "NY" Yankees caps I see people wearing.  I'm pretty sure that many of these people could not name more than one or two actual New York Yankees, but the iconic "NY" cap has become associated with the city and even the entire country. Are these non-fans being disingenuous by sporting the Yankees iconic logo or simply embracing the New York or American identity?

Emile Dupont-Zipcy / Charles-Nicolas Cochin

Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication.

There's another way to view Franklin's image.  Decades after Franklin wowed the French with this image, another great American with a knack for crafting personas wrote these words:

"Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself. / (I am large.  I contain multitudes.)" 

That American was Walt Whitman, who recognized--as did Ralph Waldo Emerson, who made a similar point in his brilliant essay "Self-Reliance"--that humans are complex beings.  We may want to simplify, even stereotype others because it's easier on our brains, but humans have multiple perspectives and proclivities.  When Franklin contradicted himself, he may have simply been showing different parts of his complex human personality.  In the spirit of Whitman's wonderful line, we should give ourselves and others grace to be complex, even contradictory at times. 

We all contain multitudes.