"Moral Clarity"

 I hope this essay does not come across as narcissistic or sanctimonious. Certainly, no one should read into this essay that I am an example of moral righteousness, for I am not. But it is a subject which many of us think about, especially now with both political parties being held hostage by extremists, with neither side listening to the other and with both deliberately misinterpreting what is being proposed; with hatred pervading our elite universities, as seen in a rise of anti-Semitism; and with both presumed presidential candidates lacking a moral spine. Given our time and place, some thoughts on moral clarity seemed timely.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“Moral Clarity”

November 13, 2023

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

“Over the years, I have come to understand a critical difference between the world of fear

and the world of freedom. In the former, the primary challenge is finding the strength to

confront evil. In the latter, the primary challenge is finding the moral clarity to see evil.”

                                           Natan Sharansky (1948-)

   Soviet dissident and Israeli politician

                                          The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, 2004

 

Critics of “moral clarity” claim the world cannot be divided into good and evil, that there are too many nuances. As well, these critics tell us that the words “moral clarity” suggest exclusionary views, such as that expressed in the phrase, “My country, right or wrong.”

 

In my opinion they misunderstand the words, as they assign a moral equivalence based on claimed beliefs. The fact that Nazis justified the extermination of the Jewish people as a means to achieve a pure, Aryan race was an act of pure evil, as was their concept of lebensraum. It was evil that drove Hamas terrorists to parachute in and slaughter Jewish civilians, including children, in the most horrific manner. None of what they did could be compared to Israelis giving Palestinians two weeks to leave northern Gaza before sending in armed forces to ferret out terrorists in tunnels beneath Gaza City’s civilian population. Moral clarity is the ability to think clearly about good and evil, of what is right and what is wrong. There are times when wars are fought for good causes. Moral clarity implies the existence and ubiquity of evil.

 

However, among the extreme Left, the words have become pejorative, as they associate them with American conservatives. They link them to Ronald Reagan, whose popularity has never sat well with the progressive wing of the Democrat Party, and they were popularized by William Bennett in Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, a book that highlighted the tension between good and evil. Moral clarity demands the United States has a strong defense, the ability to confront enemies and support allies.  

 

As Natan Sharansky wrote in the rubric above, the challenge for western democracies is to acknowledge that evil exists. Those living under dictatorships, victims of Ku Klux Klan marauders in the early part of the 20^thCentury, and Jews subject to anti-Semitism today understand how evil infests individuals. In his 1973 book The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) wrote: “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties – but right through the human heart. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years…It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.” That each individual, regardless of race or religion, is capable of evil (as well as of goodness) has long been understood by the clergy. When Jesus was asked by His disciples how to pray, He responded with the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer rooted in the Torah and that includes the line “but deliver us from evil.” Yet there are and always have been nations that use evil to motivate their people, like the Nazis in World War II, and China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea today. They claim some group is intent on denigrating their lives so they must be destroyed, as Nazis said of Jews in the 1930s, and that today the Chinese say of the Uyghurs, Russians say of the Ukrainians, and as Iran’s proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis – say of Israelis. Evil may arise in individuals’ hearts, but it can be manifested in government actions. 

 

In his 1794 book Interesting Anecdotes, Memoirs, Allegories, Essays, and Poetical Fragments, Joseph Addison wrote: “No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.” It was with that in mind that on November 11, 1997, Justice Antonin Scalia spoke of the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, not just about what Germans did to Jews, but of how it happened in a nation noted for its civilization – a country that had been a world leader in art, music, science, and the intellect. “To fully grasp the horror of the Holocaust,” he said, “you must imagine (for it probably happened) that the commandant of Auschwitz or Dachau, when he had finished his day’s work, retired to his apartment to eat a meal that was in the finest good taste, and then to listen, perhaps, to some tender and poignant lieder of Franz Schubert.” Evil can appear swathed in clothes of the benevolent. Sinclair Lewis’ dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here comes to mind. Because it can.

 

Our Founding Fathers recognized the presence of evil, which is why they designed a government with checks and balances and judicial restraints. It was not designed to be efficient – efficiency was left to the private sector – but to be deliberative, with decisions and laws based on compromise, arrived at through consensus. The nation they created had many imperfections – the existence and persistence of slavery being the most notable. But they also created a country where justice was allowed, albeit slowly, to rise. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That has been true in democracies, where the people have a say in the government under which they live, but it has not been true in much of the world, where rule of law, property rights, free markets, and equal justice do not exist. And even in western democracies, the move toward justice can be uneven.

 

We hear complaints of the wrongs America has committed, and no one can deny that slavery existed, that native populations were killed and/or mistreated, and that limits were placed on who could vote. Those wrongs existed but were corrected. Time and history must be considered, and credit must be granted for adaption to change. Man was not created pure and good, and neither were nations, but both should be measured on how they adapt over time. Man first appeared perhaps 300,000 years ago. For most of that time he was tribal. It took thousands of years for him to begin living in communities and cities. Survival meant constant wars, and the defeated were often enslaved. Progress was slow and uneven, as we know from earlier civilizations that flourished and disappeared. We who are alive today are fortunate to live where and when we do. Are not Americans better off today than a hundred years ago? And were not most Americans better off in 1923 than in 1823. And were not Americans in 1823 better off than colonialists in 1723? It is not just standards of living that have improved over time, it is that freedom, gradually, was extended to more people – at first to those of non-European heritage, to non-property owners, and then to blacks and women.

 

But we cannot be complacent. As Ronald Reagan once said: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same…” We should respect this exceptional nation that has lived more closely to dictates of moral clarity than most others. But we should not boast of our fortune. Like religion, we do not have to carry patriotism on our sleeves, but we should not forget that we are an example for the oppressed and dispossessed across the world. We should never be ashamed of who we are.

 

Rape, murder, incest, torture, and robbery are evil in every culture. They and the seven cardinal sins – pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth – are the antithesis of moral clarity. We must restrain the evil that is present in each of us and promote the good, which is also within us. Yes Virginia, there is such a thing as moral clarity. It is not a catch phrase or a figment of the imagination. The path toward moral clarity is not always clear. It may be disguised and hard to distinguish; it may be elusive. But, as Justice Potter Stewart once said about pornography, we know it when we see it. Most important, it is a code to live by. 

"Anger"

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Anger”

June 28, 2022

 

“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in

which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”

                                                                                                                Attributed to Mark Twain (1835-1910)

                                                                

The essayist and author Lance Morrow recently penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal: “Could this be an Antebellum Age?” It certainly seems that way, though with luck a Civil War will not break out as it did in 1861. Nevertheless, anger dominates our politics, media and our culture. It separates friends and divides families. It affects judgements and makes impossible civilized debate. It permeates school board meetings, clouds differences regarding climate change, denies respectful discussion of gender politics; it was the impetus behind the January 6 riots and the subsequent, eponymous Congressional commission, and it has distorted the meaning of the Supreme Court’s decision rescinding Roe v. Wade. 

 

It is through the airing of differences that a consensus is found. Debate is integral to our government and our way of life. In his 1990 autobiography, An American Life, Ronald Reagan, wrote that when he became president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947, he “learned while negotiating contracts you seldom got everything you asked for. And I agreed with FDR, who said in 1933: ‘I have no expectations of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average.’ If you got seventy-five or eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later...” 

 

In a country as large and as diverse as ours there will always be differences in terms of what constitutes the best way forward. It is why we have elections, and it is why, at least nationally, power ricochets back and forth between the two political parties. Compromise has worked in the past, Consider the relationship between two politicians who had in common only their Irish American heritage, Republican President Reagan and Democrat House Speaker Tip O’Neill. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 was based on mutual trust and compromise. Similarly, a decade and a half later, Democrat President Bill Clinton reached out to Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and the result was the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. Yet, similar discussions between President Biden and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy are as impossible to imagine as President Trump inviting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for a quiet sherry and constructive talk.

 

The “woke” left pontificates about diversity, yet they disrespect those whose opinions diverge from their own; they speak of equity, yet they call those with whom they disagree “deplorables;” they urge inclusion but are intolerant of those who express views contrary to their own. We, who once had the ability to laugh, have grown fearful of provoking offense.

 

Why have we become so divided, so angry? Politicians find it useful to incite their bases, but why does the media not provide perspective instead of fanning the flames of hatred? Is it because profits come before civility? Why did Speaker Pelosi not allow the minority party to appoint members to the January 6 Commission, as had been done with all former such investigating bodies? Was she trying to hide her role regarding security for the Capitol on January 6? Why do some people choose to believe that nine un-elected judges make better decisions than a free, self-determining people through their elected state legislatures? In truth, the decision regarding Roe v. Wade will have little impact on the lives of most people. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in dissent: “States may, if they wish, permit abortion on demand, but the Constitution does not require them to do so.” In seventeen states, the right to abortion on demand is protected by state law. In most others, it is permitted through the first trimester. More states will pass laws protecting abortion rights. Sadly, some will not. But the world will not end.

 

We should not let anger destroy the fabric of this special nation. Joseph Joubert (1754-1854), the French essayist and moralist, once wrote: “The best remedy for a short temper is a long walk.” His words were true when he wrote them and are true today. Turn off the TV; shut down your computer, silence your cell phone, place The New York Times on the floor of the bird cage, take your loved one by the hand and go for a long walk. Let nature blossom, not your anger.

"Growing up in the 1940-50s"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Essay from Essex

“Growing up in the 1940-50s”

November 20, 2018

“Anyway, the consequence of all this is that kids were left

 pretty much to decide for themselves what games they

 would play – indeed even to invent their own games.”

                                                                              Antonin Scalia (1936-2016)

                                                                              Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived, 2017

My wife and I spent a few days, recently, at the home of four grandchildren, while their parents went to New York for a well-deserved weekend. While they were at a casino charity gala at the Yale Club, sitting in the bleachers at a Dartmouth-Columbia football game and attending Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, with the German tenor Jonas Kaufman, at the Met, we were in our cars. In the roughly forty hours we were at their house, I made fifteen four-mile trips into town. (My wife made a few of her own.) Two of the trips were for my own purposes – buying newspapers – but the rest involved the grandchildren:visits to friends, sporting events, shopping, restaurants, etc. Heading out on the 15^thtrip to somewhere, I thought of the gap between their growing up and mine. Mine were the post-Depression and post-War years. My parents, being artists, worked from home. Both of them had traveled abroad when young, but once settled in Peterborough, NH – apart from the War, visiting parents in East River, CT and Wellesley, MA, attending horseshows and going skiing – they rarely left home. The decades since my childhood have seen vast changes.   

In the late 1940s and early 1950s there were, at least in our house, no electronic gadgets, apart from a radio on which we listened to WBZ broadcasts of Red Sox games and shows like “The Lone Ranger,” Fibber McGee and Molly” and “The Shadow.” There were no electric appliances – no stove, refrigerator, washer-dryer or dishwasher; no blender, TV or toaster. A wood stove served the house until after I was married – and an electric refrigerator only arrived in 1953. Before that, we made weekly trips to the ice-man. (In my earliest memories ice was delivered, but that service was suspended not long after the War.) Ice was stored in a wooden, tin-lined ice chest and had to be replaced every four or five days. Dishes were washed by hand, and my mother, at least initially, used a laundromat. After my father died in 1968, she got a television and an electric stove. In terms of news, and apart from the radio, my parents subscribed to The New York Herald Tribune. Life, allowed us to imagine ourselves in foreign and exotic places. We read The Saturday Evening Post for its serialized stories and glanced through The New Yorker and Punch for their cartoons. We read a lot, as there were hundreds of books in the house.

Like many rural families, we had a barn. In our case it housed horses, goats, chickens, a few ducks and, later, a couple of peacocks. The goats were used for milk and butter. The chickens and ducks for eggs. The peacocks for ornamentation. The horses were an expense, until my mother began giving riding lessons in the mid 1950s. We usually had about five horses: “Nona” (a Chestnut that had belonged to my father’s family); “Jill” (a dark-colored horse who, when she died, my father buried in front of the barn); “Judy” (a Chestnut cross between a Thoroughbred and a workhorse and my usual mount. “Judy” also used to haul manure and felled trees, which were cut up and split for the wood stoves and fireplace); “Whinny” (a grey Welsh Pony given to my mother by her former headmistress, Miss Charlotte, on the occasion of the birth of her fifth child); “Star” (sired by an Arabian and foaled by “Whinny,” generally ridden by my brother Frank), and “Mitzi” (the Shetland on whom we all learned to ride). What I loved best was riding through the woods and over the “hill” to our grandparents’ summer home and then galloping “Judy” home along dirt roads. A favorite pleasure was inviting a friend to go riding, putting him or her on “Mitzi,” and then riding past the watering hole, where “Mitzi” would inevitably roll, especially when she sensed the rider was a novice.

Once, at a horse show in Dublin, New Hampshire, I got my foot caught in a stirrup and was dragged about a hundred feet, with no damage except to my ego. But my mother’s work paid off. Her youngest child, George, ultimately became a nationally-ranked dressage rider and today is president of the United States Dressage Federation.

We swam and rode horses in the summer, skated and skied in the winter. We played politically incorrect games, like “cowboys and Indians,” where the youngest were forced to play the Indians, because they always ended up dead. We traipsed through the woods, pretending to be frontiersmen, carrying toy cap-guns. (My father did not like guns, so there were never any in the house.) My father did build a jungle-gym. It was made from six-to-ten-inch diameter trees he had cut down. It stood about fifteen feet high. It had swings, bars and cross-beams on which we learned to balance. My sister Mary used it as the center piece for a Children’s Circus, which she organized in the late 1940s and that ran for a dozen years. The proceeds from the Circus – initially about $30.00 – went to what is now the Crotchet Mountain Rehabilitation Center.

As well, we played more hum-drum games, like marbles, which required a combination of dexterity and guile, with, perhaps, more emphasis on the latter. We carried them around in little leather pouches. The goal was to win your opponents’. We wrestled, sometimes for fun, other times more seriously. We played catch, and stuck crab apples on the end of a stick to see how far we could catapult them. Once I broke a dining room window. My mother made me tell my father what I had done. The trip to the studio, where he was working, was a hundred feet from the house. It took hours, or so it seemed. He commended me for my honesty, not knowing credit belonged to my mother. As we got older, and on some weekends, we went to the movies; though I have no memory of my parents ever having gone. An afternoon feature, as I recall, cost $0.35.

Another difference were cars. My son and his wife, with two children of driving age, own three cars. (An embarrassing admission is that my wife and I, with five drivers in the family, once had six cars.) Until my sister Mary and I bought a car together in 1957 – a 1947 four-door Ford coupe, for which we paid $95.00 – my family had only one car, despite nine children and living four miles from the village. The first of their cars was a 1938 Chevrolet station wagon. (I have a picture of it on the wall behind my desk, a suitcase tied to its bumper, my sister Mary and me in front holding dolls, and a goat sticking her head out the rear window.) The next was a 1941 Ford, bought second-hand after the War. That was followed by a 1953 Ford wagon and, four years later, a 1957 Ford wagon. When my mother hitched the car to the horse trailer to take a few children to a show, my father was out of luck if he needed to go to town. And when my father took a bunch of us skiing my mother had to stay home.

One consequence was that we took the bus to and from school. After-school activities would not have fit into our parents’ lifestyles. “Helicoptering” and “hovering” parents were years in the future. We entertained ourselves. Our nearest neighbor was a mile away. I was the second oldest, so knew best my older sister Mary and younger brother Frank. Next came three girls, followed by three boys. Essentially, we were trisected, though Mary substituted for my mother when the latter was in the barn or away. I was generally less helpful. Chopping wood, pitching hay and cleaning stalls were chores to be endured, not enjoyed. (I recall once the unpleasant and difficult task of burying a goat who had died when the ground was still frozen.) Most of all, though, we had time to play. Frank and I let our imaginations roam. We played in the woods and fields. While guns were not permitted, my father reluctantly allowed cap-pistols and small hunting knives, the throwing of which was an art we practiced but never mastered. The cap-pistols, however, were good for scaring chickens, goats and horses, much to our delight and to their dismay. We sometimes camped outside, and there were even times when we made it all through the night. 

Permitting children to travel alone seems quaint in an age when parents have been arrested for letting children walk home from the park or from school. We were warned about speaking to strangers, but “stranger danger” was an alien phrase. I was one of the more outgoing of my siblings, and perhaps that is why my mother and father let me fly alone when I was thirteen – my first rime on a plane. I was to meet my maternal grandmother in the Adirondacks. She was staying with her sister and husband at their camp on Upper Saranac Lake. To get there from Peterborough I flew from Keene, New Hampshire to New York’s LaGuardia, change planes, and then to Lake Placid – both legs on DC-3s. I got there without incident, but with memories that come with the excitement and freedom of being on one’s own. Wings began to sprout.

There is no right way of bringing up children, and my fondness for the past does not mean it was better than today. Nevertheless, there are lessons to be learned from history, and there are things we can do better today. We should be unafraid of letting children experience failure. We should not confuse sentimentality with compassion. We must recognize differences in children and encourage them in their strengths, while doing our best to correct their weaknesses. Children should be taught the Golden Rule, of doing unto others as they would have people do unto them. They should learn civics and the Ten Commandments. Society should encourage the traditional bonds of marriage and acknowledge the benefit of two-parent households, even as we know it is not always possible. We put undue pressure on children today, as their activities are programmed for little or no down-time. Screens take time away from reading; though video games are better than television, as the latter is passive where the brain is concerned. Luck plays a role. Accidents happen, for which there are no warnings. And there are bad people who do bad things. As well, children are different: some mature faster than others; some are better athletes, others more musical or stronger scholastically. Some have disabilities, as did one of my brothers who was born with Prader-Willi syndrome. 

But I worry that “safe places” and “trigger warnings” do more harm than good. As much as we would like to, we cannot protect all children against all harm. They have to learn to walk alone, to be independent and to take responsibility. Government provides invaluable services – a free society could not operate without it – but the concept of pre-packaged parenting – is alien to reality. Seventy-five years ago, because of the War, families were disrupted. Single-parent Moms struggled to perform both roles. But they knew it was unnatural and, hopefully, temporary – that the separation was due to the War, not choice. The general sense was that government should govern, teachers should teach and parents should parent.

To return to the rubric at the start of this essay, Justice Scalia grew up about the same time as did I, though our lives were very different. He grew up in the city; I in the country. His father, a professor of Romance languages at Brooklyn College, was an immigrant from Sicily and his mother, an elementary school teacher, was the daughter of immigrants from Italy. My parents were artists and my family had been here for generations. He was an only child. I was one of nine. He was brilliant and an over-achiever. I was average and an under-achiever. He reached the peak of his profession. I struggled up the rungs of the Wall Street ladder. Nevertheless, we had in common the need to be inventive during our free time as children. His quote, at the top of this essay is from a speech he gave in 1997 at the University Club of Washington, D.C. It applies to us both. It was imaginations that gave currency to our childhoods.

Returning to my grandchildren’s driveway for the 15^thtime that weekend, my daydreams evaporated as my mind turned to the job at hand. Don’t get me wrong, though, my children and grandchildren are smart, attractive and entertaining. I love them, and I love being with them.