Sunday column: Golden Rule edition

Today’s column is online here. The second question allows me to wax briefly philosophical, almost theological:

Two friends of mine are getting married, and my husband and I are at odds about what to give them. Neither of them gave us a wedding gift, though they joked and promised, “The check is in the mail.” I would never hold a grudge about it, but it was always in the back of my mind as strange. They both have good jobs, take elaborate vacations, purchase clothes and accessories from high-end stores. I gave them a very nice shower gift. I feel as if we should give them a wedding gift, treating others as we wish to be treated. My husband doesn’t want to give them anything.

You invoke the golden rule to argue that you liked getting wedding presents, therefore your friends would also like to get wedding presents. This is generically true, of course, but the particulars of your case differ. Thought experiment: If you had somehow — totally out of character! — neglected to buy a friend a wedding present, would you really want that friend to give you one? Or would it make you feel even guiltier and more ill at ease about how you were supposed to make your original gaffe right? The kindest thing to do might be to treat them, not as you wish to be treated, but as you, in fact, were treated.

There’s more, including a compromise option and the acknowledgment that I could be wholly off base, not knowing any of the parties involved, but I do think I’m onto something. Let’s say LW couple does pop for, oh, a Vita Mix blender (just got one this week, they’re amazing) for Couple X. Then Couple X feels worse and finally gives Couple LW a much-belated wedding present, which of course has to be at least as nice as a Vita Mix, and we all know how much those cost, so Couple X now has to get online and find a present that is in the same price range plus a couple of years’ belated-present “interest” for LW. And then there’s the race to see who will write a thank-you note first. And Christmas is around the corner, which means if either couple feels they’ve slacked in the summer exchange, they can start it all up again.

End it now, I say. Couple X clearly is awful at buying presents, so don’t make present-giving part of your friendship.

I’ll probably get several outraged letters for this.

My favorite part, though, was how the LW inadvertently got at the problem of the Golden Rule. When I converted to Judaism, I learned that the version of my youth–”Do unto others”–was considered the Christian version. The Jews say, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to others.” Framing it as a negative command, I think, is more appropriate, because the GR is a wonderful starting place for ethics, but it can’t take you all the way into etiquette and the finer points of social interaction. The more positive phrasing implies that the GR is the be-all and end-all, which … well, look. You can follow “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” to the letter and still out your birthday-having colleague to the staff at Applebee’s, as long as you think it would be great fun to have servers singing and clapping at you while diners at other tables gawk openly or stick to their conversations with grim determination.

Any ethical standard allowing–implicitly encouraging!–such behavior needs codicils and further explication, is all I’m saying.

The “That which is hateful to you” version wouldn’t stop a hardcore extrovert from pulling the Applebee’s stunt, technically, but its wording indicates that this is an ethic meant for the most fundamental questions of society-building. Nobody starts planning a party by musing, “Now, what would not be hateful unto me?”

The Golden Rule is about keeping you from committing existential sin. It still allows for many a faux pas.