By Noelle Mering
Friday, July 27, 2018
For several reasons, all embarrassing testaments to my
vice, I was listening to an interview of a beloved former contestant on ABC’s
“The Bachelorette.” He was making public amends after having traded his
good-guy persona for a series of one-night stands and unfulfilled promises.
I’m sure it’s a temptation of some enormity to be
suddenly surrounded by beautiful and willing young women who see you as you want
to see yourself. Still, he knew, as all celebrities must know, that how his
fans saw him wasn’t real. He began to cope with that disparity by becoming
louder in support of various charities. Somehow he thought that by putting his
weight behind a good cause he could bridge the chasm between perception and
reality, a chasm exacerbated by his womanizing.
His case was less egregious than, but still reminiscent
of, Harvey Weinstein’s bizarre public mea culpa about fighting the National
Rifle Association in light of the revelations of his predation. Such a jarring
non sequitur was deemed unacceptable because he’d violated the last sexual
norm: consent. But it was still revealing in how we’ve come to see public
support of a popular cause as a great balm for our personal guilt.
It made me wonder how often we all do this. We feel the
dissonance between who we ought to be and who we are, and we make up for it by
becoming noisier about some issue. If our noise can also implicitly condemn
moral beings with whom we disagree, then we might come that much closer to
feeling satisfied with ourselves.
Now, obviously we can and should fight injustice, and
certainly it’d be not only hasty, but wrong to assume that someone else’s
passion for a cause is some sort of mask for his or her interior guilt or
shame. But it’s notable that, as we’ve declined as a culture in our private
virtue, so have we increasingly globalized our public virtue.
This exchange of the personal for the global means that
virtue has become largely propositional. It’s no longer understood as something
that demands that I master passions, but now resides largely in an assent to
the right beliefs and being on the right side of a cause. It becomes idea more
than act. Do you condemn the correct things? Do you do it publicly?
We’re buoyed in this self-defeating exercise by an
ambient relativism that ironically encourages its own fundamentalism and
incivility. We think relativism will increase civility by making us more
accepting, but practically speaking it seems to have the opposite effect.
Cultural relativism implies a futility to debate. Each
person can only speak from the locked soap box of his or her own perspective.
Outside of that, there’s no intelligible or discoverable meaning upon which we
can come together.
Yet even the relativist wants to advance his vision of
the moral society. Without recourse to universals, his option for persuasion
becomes demagoguery: make your opponent seem not only wrong but bad, someone to
be shunned. There truly are some ideas that are so repugnant that they’re not
worth serious engagement, but the habit now is to conflate complex policy
disagreements without easy answers into Manichaean battles of principle
dividing the pure from the sinister.
By nature we’re moral beings. Loosening our cultural
mores doesn’t mean our moral instincts disappear. Rather, we end up flexing
that muscle more gratuitously. The less prone we are to self-examination, the
more self-aggrandizing we become in our denunciations.
It’s making our society harsher. A greater focus on
personal virtue gives us an ability to temper our emotions, to be prudent about
when to speak and what to say, and to have the humility to humanize our
ideological opponents. Mastering our passions and the intellectual habit of
seeking plausible opposing arguments can slow the intemperate outrage that’s
deforming us.
There’s no avenue to a just society that circumvents the
hard work we have to do in ourselves and within our immediate spheres of influence.
In fact, we emasculate our efforts if we exert more energy on things over which
we’ve the least amount of control.
There’s a lot of talk about civility lately, and a common
rejoinder is often some sort of contemptuous tu quoque, but the root of the problem is that being civilized
requires personal virtue; it isn’t meant to be a replacement for it. There’s no
shortcut to civility that won’t end up being a cheap veneer, easily peeled away
and corroded underneath.
There’s a reason Mother Teresa famously said that the way
to change the world is to go home and love your family. She knew the sadness
and injustice of the world. She also knew the solution.
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