“ORTHOLOGY: ὀρθολογία”:
Speaking with Sensibility, Talking with Propriety

Eduardo Chaves

Last year (2023) I lost a great friend. He was 103 years old.

This blog will be my tribute to him.

I first met him in 1961. He was the Principal of a coed Boarding School in which I was enrolled in order to attend go to High School. In Brazil, at that time, there were two national curricular for High School. One was called the “Scientific Curriculum”, for people interested in the natural, biological and human sciences, as well as in mathematics, engineering, and technology. The other, called  the “Classical Curriculum”, for people interested in the Humanities, in general: languages, literature, history, logic and philosophy. I chose this option.

I stayed in the Boarding School for three years, and the school had about one hundred students and ten or twelve teachers, all of which lived full time on campus. Of the about one hundred students, one fourth were girls. They lived in an enormous house, across the railroad tracks and a creek, that kept them away from us, boys. The distance from our quarters to their house was about three fourths of a mile. In between there was the house of the grounds keeper, who doubled up as a watchful and vigilant sentinel of the girls’ living quarters. I was seventeen when I got there and the Principal, Rev. Olson Pemberton, Jr,  must have been around forty – he was 23 years older than I. We were friends for 63 years.

During the 63 years of our friendship, we disagreed on many things, sometimes strongly. Observing his behavior and his counsels I learned to speak, talk, discuss and debate the hardest subjects and themes without losing temper, calm, tenderness, a look of affection, love and respect for those who were listening to us or talking with us. He helped me learn that the process of dialogue, such as the one involved in Win-Win negotiations, must take place in an emotional climate built upon mutual trust, empathy, and real desire to go for a solution that has significant gains for all parties involved. The negotiation should never be closed if some of the parties felt that they had been treated unfairly and that something essential to them was not given due attention by all. And the manner of the conversation was also object of attention and concern. All of the participants must be kind, gentle and considerate when speaking to the whole group or to someone in particular. And everyone should focus on being truthful, honest, and fair, always avoiding arrogance, condescension, feelings of superiority, disdain for somebody else’s view. Good Win-Win negotiation must take place in groups and meetings where everyone can feel a climate of fellowship and communion, not a climate of us vs them, not an atmosphere of adversariness.

I learned these lessons from my Principal and, later, friend, Rev. Pemberton.

Only much later, after leaving the boarding school, going through college and graduate school, spending 35 years teaching, and living through innumerable negotiations that were exaclty the opposite of what Rev. Pemberton proposed to us and achieved in his school, did I identify a term that summarized well what Rev. Pemberton was after: orthology, or ὀρθολογία, in Greek, which points to sensible, respectful, but frank speaking, and considerate, sincere, proper, but open conversation.

I want this blog to contemplate, as its title and subtitle say, not orthodoxy, which demands the correction of the content of speech and conversation, but orthology, which privileges the way of speaking and the art of conversing, the speaking sensibly, with empathy and respect for others, talking with propriety, tranquility, and real tolerance, in an atmosphere of affection and well-being in which virtually anything can be said without offending anyone.

Plagiarizing some words and expressions from the lyrics of Valsinha, a song by Chico Buarque and Vinicius de Moraes, one of my very favorite popular songs, I would like this new blog to become a starting point for new, truly Socratic conversations, “the likes of which have not been dared for a long time”, with the help of which we could engage in philosophical discussions “smelling of the mold and mildew of old, well-guarded ideas”, held in environments whose climate always had been of sensibility and propriety, “the likes of which have not been seen for a long time”.

In Salto, SP, Brazil, May 16, 2024.