Role models and true stories of principles
From 16Guidelines
Albert Schweizer: Principles
During his twenties, Albert Schweitzer was a prosperous and successful Christian pastor, musician and academic in Strasbourg, Germany. What almost no-one knew was that he had made a personal vow to change his life at the age of thirty. Highly critical of the contemporary Church, he wanted not simply to talk about Jesus’s life of compassionate service, but to put it into practice. To the surprise and dismay of family and friends, Schweitzer re-trained as a medical doctor and set off to found a hospital at Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa.
The principle of ‘Reverence for Life’ which Schweitzer developed during his years in Africa was rooted in what he later described as the most powerful experience of his youth. When out with a friend shooting at some birds with a catapult, Schweitzer realised that he did not want to kill. From that day onwards he tried always to follow his own principles, regardless of what anyone thought or said about him. “Never for a moment do we lay aside our mistrust of the ideals established by society, and of the convictions which are kept by it in circulation.”
Later in life, the left-handed Schweitzer taught himself to write with his right hand rather than disturb the cat which habitually slept on his left arm. It is a small but poignant example of his principle “a man’s life is the same as his thought.”
For Schweitzer, our inner moral being perishes if we become too tired to share the life, experiences and sufferings of the creatures around us. “Woe to us if our sensitivity grows numb. It destroys our conscience in the broadest sense of the world: the consciousness of how we should act dies.”
Schweitzer had an outstanding intellect and was a free thinker for whom nothing was off limits. However he believed that unless our values are rooted in both the rational and the mystical/emotional aspects of our being, then they will lack vitality. In line with this, he never saw ‘Reverence for Life’ as a set of rules, but rather as a basic principle to guide the difficult decisions that each individual is called to make.
Princeton Experiment: Principles
A famous experiment was conducted at Princeton University in 1973, in which a group of theology students was asked to walk across campus to deliver a sermon on the topic of the Good Samaritan. As part of the research, some of the students were told that they were late and needed to hurry. Along the route, the researchers Darley and Batson had placed an actor, who was lying on the ground in pain and in need of help. In their haste to give a sermon on compassion, 90% of the "late" students from Princeton Theology Seminary completely ignored the needs of the suffering person. Some of them literally stepped over him.
