A BIT OF HISTORY
©2020 SARAH BECKER
“W
e may be done with COVID-19, but COVID-19 is not done with us,” NIH Director Francis Collins noted not long ago. The rapidly transmitting coronavirus has taken hold and the number of cases, of deaths per capita endures. “COVID-19 is extraordinarily widespread,” the Center for Disease Control’s Dr. Deborah Birx said in early August. “Particularly asymptomatic spread in people under 30.” The number of American children infected as of August 13: 338,000. America, by all measures, has yet to successfully slow COVID-19’s spread. California’s caseload now exceeds New York’s. No effective vaccine exists; vaccine hesitancy has yet to be mulled and too many refuse to regularly wear protective face masks. Or maintain 6’ of social distance. How in this COVID-19 era is success defined? Today’s success literature draws heavily on history. “Benjamin Franklin [1706-1790] was Old Town Crier
Ben Franklin & COVID-19 a close observer of human conduct, and recognized at an early age that certain attitudes and behaviors are more conducive to success and happiness than others,” author Steven Covey wrote in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. “Much of the success literature of the past 50 years…was filled with social image consciousness and quick fixes—with social band-aids and aspirin that addressed acute problems… but left the underlying chronic problems untouched to fester and resurface again.” “Almost all of the success literature in the first 150 years…focused on what could be called the Character
Ethic—things like integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty and the Golden Rule,” Covey explained. “Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is representative of that literature.” “The Character Ethic taught that there are basic principles of effective living, and that people can only experience true success…as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character,” Covey continued. “But shortly after World War I the basic view of success shifted from the Character Ethic to… the Personality Ethic, success being more a function of
personality, of public image, of attitudes and behaviors.” “When I was a Boy, I met with a Book intitled Essays to do Good, which I think was written by your Father [Boston Puritan Cotton Mather, 1663-1728],” Benjamin Franklin wrote Samuel Mather in 1784. “[S] everal Leaves of it were torn out: But the Remainder gave me such a Turn of Thinking as to have an Influence on my Conduct thro’ Life; for I have always set a greater Value on the Character of a Doer of Good, than on any other kind of Reputation; and if I have been, as you seem to think, a useful Citizen, the Publick owes the Advantage
of it to that Book…[Your father] was a Man that never miss’d any Occasion of giving Instruction, and he once said to me, You are young and have the World before you; STOOP as you go through it, and you will miss many hard Thumps. This Advice, thus beat into my head has frequently been of use to me, and often I think of it when I see Pride mortified….” “[Franklin] observed that happiness seemed to be more related to what went on within a person than without,” Covey concluded. “He had also come to believe that success could be better measured by the good a person does than by any other means…There is also the intrinsic security that comes as a result of effective interdependent living.” Benjamin Franklin—one of the most admired men of the Enlightenment, America’s Voltaire—was the youngest of ten children and had little formal schooling. He was born on Boston’s Milk Street, the son of a soap- and candlemaker. Yet Franklin, a retired printer at age 42; a scientist and inventor, became one of A BIT OF HISTORY > PAGE 10
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