"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. 

"Parents and Schools"

 Whether the current Administration is the most corrupt in the history of our nation, I leave to those better qualified to decide. But, as we know from the influence peddling of Hunter Biden and the recent revelations of Merrick Garland’s son-in-law’s business ties to the teaching of critical race theory, there is no question as to its corruption.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Parents and Schools”

October 16, 2021

 

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

                                                                                            Terry McAuliffe

                                                                                            Democrat gubernatorial candidate, Virgini

                                                                                            September 29, 2021, in debate with Glenn Youngkin

 

“Regardless of family background, students whose parents are involved in their

schooling are more likely to have higher grades and test scores, attend school

regularly, have better social skills, show improved behavior, and adapt well to school.”

                                                                                        National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education, 2006

 

Terry McAuliffe was correct in the sense that it would be impossible for a school to design individual syllabuses for each child. Nevertheless, the input of parents should be sought, not denied. As the NCPIE (quoted above) expressed, when parents do take an active interest in the education of their children they achieve higher grades, gain better social skills and more easily adapt to school.

 

It was once rare for any American of any political persuasion to deny the importance of parents in the education of their children. As educator and author Dorothy H. Cohen (1915-1979) once observed. “No school can work well for children if parents and teachers do not act in partnership on behalf of the children’s best interests.” Now, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s weaponization of the Justice Department has put that partnership at risk. In response to a letter to President Biden from the National School Boards Association, which likened parents’ protests to acts of domestic terror, Mr. Garland said he would use the Patriot Act against those parents who have “threatened” school boards for the teaching of critical race theory-type themes, adopting NEA New Business Item 39[1], cancelling history and tradition, distributing sexually explicit curricular materials, and allowing transgender bathrooms.

 

Violence against any person, including school board members, is a crime, but disallowing dissenting voices of parents is a violation of their First Amendment rights. As for the rights of public schools to teach what they choose, consider Justice Clarence Thomas’ 2011 dissent in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants: “The ‘freedom of speech’ as originally understood, does not include a right to speak to minors without going through the minors’ parents or guardians.” To arbitrarily ignore parents’ concerns is what one would expect of a totalitarian regime more interested in indoctrination than education, not from the world’s foremost and oldest constitutional republic. 

 

In America, education flourished when it emphasized the basic elements or reading, writing and arithmetic, and, as students progressed, when it encouraged skepticism, inquiry and empiricism. Unfortunately, public school education today de-emphasizes education in favor of equity, to achieve graduation rates that reflect the racial composition of the student body. Standardized tests have been eliminated. The Regent Exams in New York have been watered down over the years, and in 2019 a commission was established to potentially eliminate the exams as a requirement for high school graduation. In this past year, New York’s Mayor de Blasio ordered the elimination of the city’s gifted and talented programs. In Oregon, Governor Kate Brown signed a bill ending a requirement that high school students prove they are proficient in reading, writing and math before they are granted diplomas. 

 

This dumbing down of educational standards is being done in the name of social justice, as the claim is that standardized tests are unfair to racial minorities and people of color. The sad thing is that those are the very people who have benefitted by such programs. In a list of the top ten secondary schools around the world attended by Nobel recipients over the past one hundred and twenty years, five are in the United States, four are in France and one in England. Of the five in the United States, four are elite public high schools in New York City. Historically, these schools have accepted the brightest students, regardless of race or color. While the student bodies of these schools may not be representative of the population, they reflect a truism that progressives do not acknowledge – that while people are equal in rights and under the law, they are not and never will be equal in abilities or aspirations. If there are too few blacks admitted to these elite high schools that is the fault of their elementary and middle schools, not of the tests. To claim otherwise suggests innate racial differences, which I do not believe to be true, and neither do the parents of these children, which can be seen in their demand for more charter schools and vouchers.

 

Wealthy parents, which include most members of Congress and a substantial number of the Washington bureaucracy, do not have to engage in heated discussions with local school boards, as they have options. If they do not like a school’s curriculum, they can move to a different district or enter their child in a private school. Poorer parents, regardless of race and especially those in inner cities and in rural areas, do not have that option; so, if they see or hear something of which they disapprove, they can and they should express their opinions. It is their duty as a parent.

 

The decline of the nuclear family has adversely affected all children, as it pertains to education Aristotle wrote that the family is nature’s established association for the supply of mankind’s everyday wants. In 1995, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was asked what was the biggest change he had seen over his 40-year career. He responded: “The biggest change, in my judgment, is that the family structure has come apart all over the North Atlantic world.” In the April 24, 2012 edition of The New York Times, William Bennett, former secretary of education, wrote: “The family is the linchpin of society, both economically and socially.”

 

Yet traditional family formations have been in decline for over half a century. According to PEW Research, 64% of all children today – those under age 18 – live in married two-parent households. In 1960 that number was 88%. According to the CDC, four out of every ten children today are born to unwed mothers. The statistics for black children are more devastating. In 1965, 24% of black children were born to unwed mothers. By 2018, according to the National Vital Statistics Report, 69% of black children were born out of wedlock. Because of the effects such births have on poverty and education, reasons for this decline should be investigated by a bi-partisan panel. One consequence, as it affects education, is that school boards, unions and teachers have accrued power at the expense of parents.

 

Schools should teach history and civics with honesty and without bias, while keeping historical actions taken and words written within the context of time and place. Like a nation, schools do not have to be perfect to be good. But they should not teach discriminatory policies, treat children as other than their biological selves, or alienate parents who only want what is best for their children. Morally and ethically, this is the right path to follow.

 

 

 

 

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[1] The NEA New Business Item states: “The NEA will provide an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or the 1619 project.”