Delphic Maxim 4: Respect your parents
By: Pat Norman
Tags: Delphi, Respect, Love, Parents

The challenge I’ve set myself — in order to get in the habit of writing regularly — is to respond to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes every morning, and the paste it unedited into Medium. The Delphic Maxims were carved on stones around the Oracle at Delphi in Ancient Greece. They’re a kind of guidelines for living your life. Now, just because an ancient culture made these prescriptions for life doesn’t mean that they’re still relevant today. A lot of young men (Jordan Peterson fans) worship Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. And there’s a lot that’s admirable about Stoic philosophy — but there’s also a lot that’s missing or dated. And even more importantly: any ethical guide to life is of its time. There might be some principles you can carry forward — and definitely with each translation some of that work gets done — but in the main, life has changed dramatically over time.

So let me attempt to unpack the Delphic Maxims and translate them, in my own terms, for a contemporary world.

4. Respect your parents

Respect seems, these days, to be a bit of an antiquated notion. Something that is ‘earned’ rather than afforded by contingency (the philosophical word for ‘accident’, ‘chance’, or ‘fate’, if you’re so inclined). There aren’t many contexts in which I’d say respect should be automatically given, though in this case I think the Greeks were on the right track.

You should respect your parents. At least insofar as they are responsible for raising you, for teaching you about the world, without which you wouldn’t be able to understand the concept of respect.

It is possible for parents to lose respect, but that is an extremely rare circumstance indeed. And it might even pay to broaden the definition of ‘parents’ to those that made you who you are. I love my mum and dad, and I try my hardest to show respect for them, or at least to be respectful. There are plenty of times when — much younger and foolish than I am now — I definitely didn’t show respect. That’s part of the arrogance of youth: when you’re a teenager or in your early twenties, independence is a new thing, and respect seems to be synonymous with control. It’s understandable I guess, but at least through that haze of rebellion most of us still feel respect for our parents, even if we don’t show it. Hopefully you grow out of it — you should.

And respect is not the same thing as being controlled. Respect is a quality, a disposition towards a person, a deference towards someone as a sign of your love, appreciation, and acknowledgement of their value to you. I don’t have time for the nationalist demand to respect symbols like flags and coats of arms, or people in positions of authority who abuse that authority. This sort of ‘demanded’ respect cheapens genuine respect. Respect when it’s freely given represents something quite deep in our character — it’s as much an intellectual process as an emotional one, so the idea that some unthinking object or petulant leader should command respect is facile.

It’s the loving and deep-seated respect that I think translates best for the world we live in. So while there may not be many spaces in which that kind of respect makes sense today, we owe it to those that raised us and helped us to be in the world.

Respect is the gratitude the soul pays those to whom it is indebted for making us who we are.