Every Good Morning

At 72, a daily accounting of my life runs through my head often these days. It is hard to be honest about one’s own life, hard to bear too much reality, as Mr. Eliot said. Still, it is a useful exercise to at least try to be ruthless in making judgments, if for no other reason than to see clearly in the time remaining. I sat outside with a legal […]

IX Ultimately, one will not be able to ignore plain, obvious cruelty that shows itself in one’s immediate presence. A person makes a psychic accommodation to it, walks away, averts his or her eyes … or a person ‘gets up’. No one can predict which one he or she will be. Circumstances show us what we are. Those who ‘get up’ respond to a kind of moral emergency. Something inside […]

VI Cruelty may begin with submission freely given because a person wants to belong to a group because that group represents an idea he supports or an identity he wishes to take on or because doing so will provide him with advancement in the world. A Nazi does not have to be a fanatic. He can do his or her work in a desultory fashion, buried within a bureaucracy, while […]

III We appear to be neither fundamentally good nor bad. I see no evidence for either as the dominant virtue or vice, but I have seen and continue to see plenty of evidence of our fundamental malleability when we gather in groups, especially when peer pressure, dogmatic beliefs, fear, a lust for vengeance and propaganda come into play. Stanley Milgram’s experiment illustrated how authority alone, even without using threats or physical coercion, had […]