Every Good Morning

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 […]

I I was about 10 when I pushed a lightning bug into an ants’ nest and watched them carry it to its death. I remember no pleasure coming from this. I remember being curious. What would happen? I felt no emotion. At the time the Baltimore Catechism presented age 7 as the age of reason, the age at which we  left our innocence behind and became accountable for our actions […]