Up YOur
Rectitude!
I was hanging out with Doc
in Santa Barbara the day after the UCSB CITS Forum on
Digital Transitions, when he threw away one of his many
throwaway lines. "Most
people go wrong because they fall in love with their own rectitude. It
keeps them from being practical." Our usual scatological
riffs
began, so I immediately labeled him:
Doc Searls, Practicologist
I'm not sure what kind of scope we can use to peer up each
other's rectitudes, but we sorely need one. In Sunday's NYTimes
Magazine, Peter Beinart offered The Rehabilitation of the
Cold-War Liberal, suggesting that
old-school cold-war liberals can provide a circumspect model to lead
America out of our current long days journey into right:
In
America, no less than in the Islamic world, the struggle for
democracy relies on economic opportunity. To contemporary ears, the
phrase "struggle for American democracy" sounds odd. In George W.
Bush's Washington, such struggles are for lesser nations. But in the
liberal tradition, it is not odd at all. Almost six decades ago,
Americans for Democratic Action was born, in the words of its first
national director, to wage a "two-front fight for democracy, both at
home and abroad," recognizing that the two were ultimately indivisible.
That remains true today. America is not a fixed model for a benighted
world. It is the democratic struggle here at home, against the evil in
our society, that offers a beacon to people in other nations struggling
against the evil in theirs. "The fact of the matter," Kennan declared,
"is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere,
way down deep, in each and every one of us." America can be the
greatest nation on earth, as long as Americans remember that they are
inherently no better than anyone else.
In other words, we are being hoisted by our own rectitude.
This is a theme that many have tried to teach us. Just the other day,
Musician Neil Young offered a clue when interviewed
by Showbiz Tonight's
fabulously big-haired Sibila Vargas.
Forgive a moment of ad wominem carping: I swear, as David Weinberger
reports, these
words actually escape her collagen-blessed
lips: "You've got one song, called 'Let's Impeach the President' What
is this song about?"
A question so colossally dumb that Young hardly knows what to
do with it.
She goes on to ask if he's concerned
that he'll be considered unpatriotic, suggesting that "cynics" might
say that Neil Young is capitalizing on the Bush backlash to sell more
records and that he might not be justified in saying these things
because he's a Canadian (who has lived in the US longer than Sibila
Vargas has been alive. If this made-for-TV hottie had a triple-digit
IQ, she might have better questions.
Neil Young: "If you have a conscience, you can't go through
your day without realizing what's going on and questioning, and saying,
'Is this right?' We have to be cognizant of the fact that we can
make mistakes. That's part of freedom. We don't all have to believe in
what our President
believes to be patriotic. . . No one, George Bush or anyone else, owns
the
9-11 mentality."
She still didn't get it. "Are you concerned about any
backlash?" Young: "I'm not in the least bit concerned. I expect it. I
respect other people's opinions. That's what makes the United States
and Canada great is the fact that you can differ from your friends you
can still sit down at the same table and break bread with your friend."
Don't miss the Anchor's heated, pointed retort to the
surprised Sibila: "It's terrific hearing Neil Young speaking out on
this very controversial subject, and, on the theme of what he said,
anybody who feels that the themes of this album are motivated by the
need for publicity, I think that's
ridiculous."
Human
kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it
would be easy to condemn. The
boundaries between groups overlapped and we
must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels
and those were devils.
Certainly, it was a considerable achievement for a guard or foreman to
be kind to the prisoners in spite of all the camps influences, and, on
the other hand, the baseness of a prisoner who treated his own
companions badly was exceptionally contemptible. Obviously the
prisoners found the lack of character in such men especially upsetting,
while they were profoundly moved by the smallest kindness received from
any of the guards. I remember how one day a foreman secretly gave me a
piece of bread which I knew he must have saved from his breakfast
ration. It was far more than the small piece of bread which moved me to
tears at that time. It was the human "something" which this man also
gave to me – the word and look which accompanied the gift.
"From
all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world,
but only these two the "race" of the decent man and the
"race" of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate
into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or
indecent people. In this sense, no group is of "pure race"
and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp
guards.
"Life
in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its
depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human
qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil?
The rift dividing good and evil, which goes through all human beings,
reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom
of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp."
Al Solzhenitsyn Chimes In
Then there's the Alexander
Solzhenitsyn viewpoint,
troubling to absolutists because he's an even more famous concentration
camp survivor, in his native Russia.
"The
universal dividing line between good and evil runs not between
countries, not between nations, not between parties, not between
classes, not between good and bad men: the dividing line cuts across
nations and parties, shifting constantly. . . . It divides the heart of
every man."
"The
Pharisees, in an attempt to discredit Jesus, brought a woman charged
with adultery before him. Then they reminded Jesus that adultery was
punishable by stoning under Mosaic
law and challenged him to judge
the woman so that they might then accuse him of disobeying the law.
Jesus thought for a moment and then replied, "He that is without sin
among you, let him cast the first stone at her." The people crowded
around him were so touched by their own consciences that they departed.
When Jesus found himself alone with the woman, he asked her who were
her accusers. She replied, “No man, lord.” Jesus
then said, "Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more." "For
the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse
unless each of us does his best. So let us be alert – alert
in a twofold sense:
Since
Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.
And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake."
Yep, we need to guard against our own rectitude and its codependent,
Certitude.
11:02:09 PM 
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