Moral Health

To visit Auschwitz is to obtain a glimpse of raw evil.  It is to obtain a glimpse of a set of circumstances that rendered human beings as vulnerable as they could possibly be and still have control of their bodily functions.  The context of AuschTwitz is that of having a human will but having virtually no say as to when one may exercise it.  Significantly, Auschwitz was a conduit for my understanding of child sexual abuse and some of the phenomena that come with it.

In the face of extraordinary evil, disassociation is very much a coping mechanism.  One learns how to be present and not present all at once; for that is the only way not to let the evil entirely devour one.  Disassociation is a way of blunting psychic pain.  Children who are victims of systematic child sexual abuse typically learn to disassociate as a way of coping with the abuse.

I spent 5 separate days visiting Auschwitz.  On one day I spent more than an hour standing in a cubicle not larger than 3 square feet in which 10 people were kept.  The only alternative is to become another self in order for the sane self to have any chance of survival.  This is why it is so often the case the victims of the Holocaust were so reluctant to talk about it.  For they often survived by making the experience an out-of-body experience.  And to talk about it would be to accord the experience a reality in their thoughts that they do not want to accord it.  I hint at another explanation at the end of this essay.

Next to Holocaust victims or victims of the Middle Passage during American Slavery or atrocities of this magnitude: victims of child sexual abuse are the most vulnerable victims on the face of this earth.

There is nothing that a child wants more than affirmation from the adult figures who are a regular part of her or his life.  The child abuser takes that hope and devastates it by abusing the trust that issues from it.  The child sexual abuser preys upon the child’s need for affirmation.  The child sexual abuser masterfully exploits that need.

Victims of the Holocaust were helpless.  Victims of child sexual abuse are helpless.  In first case, there was the crippling power of the Nazi regime.  In the second case, there is the moral authority and the physical power of the parent.

Speaking to the moral authority: Victims of child sexual abuse insist that what they are doing to the child is all right.  The child is told that letting the adult touch his body in sexual ways is natural or an appropriate way to show the adult gratitude or an acceptable way to earn the adults approval.  But this comes at a price; for the child is told that he must not talk about event to anyone.

The demand for silence is what indicates to the child’s psyche that there is something wrong with the experience.  For since when is a child not permitted to talk about the things that he experience.  That is what children do incessantly and indiscriminately.  And with wholesome experiences, even appropriate forms of punishment, the chatter is just fine.

But the enforcement of silence that accompanies systematic child sexual abuse renders what is happening to the child unnatural.  So the child knows that what is taking place is wrong although he cannot give articulation to it.  This is quite profound when one considers the matter.  There is indeed a sense of justice, albeit ever so inchoate, in the development of the self of a child.  One cannot do anything that one pleases to a child and have the child believe that it is just.  It is one thing to not tell a person here and there.  It is quite another not to tell anyone, ever.

It is striking that Nazi Germany also imposed a code of silence.  What was being done to Jews in the camps was not much talked about, which is precisely what made it so surrealistic.  How does one kill millions of people and not talk about it?  And so while Hitler claimed to be doing the work of the Lord, the code of silence that he imposed indicates that he knew otherwise.

To visit Auschwitz is to grasp the profundity of this point.  With trains rolling in to the camps on a daily basis and the stench of burnt bodies regularly filling the air, the only way for ordinary citizens of Nazi Germany not to know is that they were either elsewhere in Europe or themselves dead.

This brings us to the deep, deep anger that victims of systematic child sexual abuse typically feel.  Every adult who does such a thing knows that he is doing wrong.  And the code of silence that he imposes makes this unquestionably clear.

The proof of an inchoate sense of justice is that no one has ever been the victim of systematic and vicious harm and somehow supposed that he or she were being treated appropriately.  Children are not the exception to this.  Having been the object of systematic wrongdoing at an early age, victims of child sexual abuse are typically teeming with utter rage.

But the greatest harm lies in the lesson that they learn.  They learn the significance of raw power; and they learn that lesson while having their trust utterly destroyed.  Accordingly, they come to have a warped sense of intimacy.  Thus, it is no surprise that many victims of sustained child sexual abuse often become abusers themselves.  It is also no surprise that these individuals are often masters at dissimulating loving behavior.  This comes with the radical disassociation that is typically occasioned by the experience.

The typical child abuser can exhibit loving behavior at one moment and cruel behavior the next.  This parallels a child’s being child-like in one home context (say the living room and kitchen) and a victim of sexual abuse in another home context (such as the bedroom).  Having been the victim of masterful manipulation as a child, what we often find that, as an adult, the very same individual is now capable of masterful manipulation and sees sexual intimacy in terms of abusive power.

In a published essay entitled “The Grip of Immorality: Child Abuse and Moral Failure” (1996), I argued that the victims of sustained child sexual abuse typically end up with a morally warped erotic emotional configuration.  And this, I think, gives us an insight into the deafening silence of Holocaust survivors.  To have survived Auschwitz is to have a most poignant sense of having waltzed with evil itself.  And that is too close for comfort to having run the risk, albeit not intentionally, of becoming an evil person.

In the case of Cindy Sheehan, there is one thing more than any other that to my mind is abominable and utterly loathsome; and that is the characterization of her protest behavior against the Iraq war as being on a par with the noble behavior of individuals such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.  This elevation of her status is being done by people who should know better.  Political leaders and college professors.  The proof of this is that she was even a finalist for the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize.

I fully support Sheehan’s right to advance her message; and I understand all too well that there are many who agree with her.  But not no one has the right to elevate her at the expense of denigrating the good that others have done.  And that is precisely what is being done when, Emeritus Professor Michael Nagler of UC-Berkeley, for instance, would dare to compare the anti-war struggles of Cindy Sheehan with the struggles against racial injustice led by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sheehan is no more a Martin Luther King than is Sir Elton John a Mozart or a Beethoven.

Here is a simple difference that any intellectual, and surely a Berkeley professor, ought to grasp from the very start.  By definition, obviously, racial injustice is wrong; whereas it is not the case that by definition war is wrong; otherwise, one would have to declare the war against Nazi Germany morally wrong—a declaration which borders on sheer lunacy.

So, the most that Ms. Sheehan can claim is that the war against Iraq is wrong.  What she cannot possibly claim is that all wars are wrong.  This, then, constitutes an enormous difference in magnitude between the efforts of King and the efforts of Sheehan.  (more…)

Every now and then a major company in the United States commits an act of unqualified goodness.  Recently, I walked into one of the Syracuse NY offices of Enterprise Rent-A-Car (located in East Syracuse) in order to return a car.  While standing at the counter, I saw a fax coming through.  The manager, whom I know very well, attended to the fax.  In my usual retiring and shy way, I “badgered” him about attending to a fax rather than a loyal customer.  The response was a most pleasant surprise.  The manager handed me the fax.

No, the fax was not about me.  Rather, it was about the pledge of Enterprise Rent-A-Car to plant 50 million trees over the next 50 years.  What a marvelous humanitarian gesture on the part of a major U.S. company.  There are not many time in my life when I can say that I am truly proud to be doing business with a company.  But this was surely one of those instances.

I have been regularly renting from Enterprise Rent-A-Car for over 12 years.  And they have always been wonderfully thoughtful and respectful and generous in their dealings with me.  They have picked me up in order to rent a car; and they have dropped me off at my home or office when I have returned the car.

Nowadays, companies seem so driven by the goal of maximizing profits that customer loyalty often seems to not count for much of anything at all.  But this has not been the case with Enterprise Rent-A-Car.  It has been a privilege and an honor to do business with them.  The goodwill that I have experience has manifested over several managers.  So I know that it is more of a reflection upon the company than this or that particular individual.  I have watched one employee after another exhibit grace under pressure.

But let me return to the company’s pledge of planting 50 million trees.  If one goes to

http://www.arborday.org/enterprise/about/about_history.cfm

not only can one download for free a marvelous screensaver, more importantly: one can read about the pledge.

In a world in which just about everyone is concerned about getting more, there is something very lovely and magnificent about a major U.S. company doing something to replenish the earth.

As the sentence on page 2 reads:

A million trees a year is not a total solution, but it’s a step in the right direction

So very, very true.  If every major company in the world should make just one step in the right direction, what a difference for the better that would make.  Likewise, if every person were to make just one step in the right direction.  What I particularly like is that Enterprise Rent-A-Car is taking this step of planting 50 million trees in a quite independent manner.  The company is waiting for some other company or person to do the right thing.  It is stepping up to the moral-environmental plate all on its own.

There is no better inspiration than that of a marvelous example.  You want to inspire courage or honesty or kindness, then be courageous or honest or kind.  For as the saying goes “Actions speak louder than words”.  When a person’s actions match his noble words, then we have might be a called a form of manifest moral congruence in the person’s life.  The person does not just express an ideal of excellence, but she or he is an exemplification of that ideal.  And that is to give others something that is truly marvelous to witness.  And this is why actions speak louder than words; for it is only with the appropriate actions that we witness the behavior in question which in turn occasions an imprimatur like nothing else can.

Now, perhaps there will be much fanfare and publicity about the matter.  However, I am struck by the fact the project has been well under way in manner that is quite non-ostentatious.  Indeed, it is quite by luck that I know about the matter.  Had I returned the car 30 minutes earlier, I most certainly would not have known about it—at least not today.  And I had returned it 30 minutes later, it is most unlikely that I would have, since the employees would have been already turned their attention to other things.  But as so often the case with what is called moral luck, the timing was exquisite.

It would not be wrong for Enterprise Rent-A-Car to publicize their commitment to planting 1 million trees over the next 50 years.  Not at all.  There is nothing whatsoever wrong with there being a webpage informing individuals about this very wonderful project.

Just so, the manner in which things have been done tell us an awful lot about a person’s character.  Even in public, I can give $50 to someone in need in a way that does not call attention to myself.  Or, I can do so in a way that makes it clear that I want everyone to see that I did.  It is only with the first that we kind of the virtuous act that is saintly and inspirational.  With the second what we have is a manifestly self-serving piece of behavior.

When one goes to the site of Enterprise Rent-A-Car the project is very tastefully mentioned.  There are no flashing icons or lights or whatever that draws one’s attention to the project.  Clicking on the announcement of the project, takes one to a webpage hosted by The National Arbor Day Foundation where the project is discussed in great detail.

Did Enterprise Rent-A-Car engage in the project for no other reason than its publicity value?  Or, did it do so because it wanted to do something that would be a step towards making the future a better place.  All that I can say is that it very much looks as if the latter is the case.  And that is very much to the company’s credit.

Oh how wonderful it would be if every company were virtuous in the way that Enterprise Rent-A-Car is.  Perhaps all are; and I am simply not hearing about it.  But I doubt it.  What can I say, I have been in all sorts of stores and I have had all sorts of exposure to first one bit of information and then another.  To date, no one has drawn my attention to such a thing being done by another company.  We know that Bill Gates of Microsoft has been extremely magnanimous.  He stands out in this regard.  And that is just the point.  In a like manner it would appear that Enterprise Rent-A-Car stands out.

John Stuart Mill wrote about the importance of approbation and disapprobation.  This blog-entry is an exercise in moral approbation.  In a world surfeited with acts of greed, I am exceedingly proud to be a customer of Enterprise Rent-A-Car.  I am truly delighted to bear witness to and to report this act of moral excellence on the part of the company.  In the company’s own words:

A million trees a year is not a total solution, but it’s a step in the right direction

Adopting a child is, without a doubt, one of the most extraordinary moral excellences that a person can exhibit.  One the one hand, there is nothing dramatic about it, in that adopting a child is not about taking on some great risk, or overcoming imminent danger or fear.  On the other, it is a most magnanimous deed, in that one commits one to carrying for and raising a child as if the infant were one’s own flesh and blood.  The case of adoption masterfully shows that blood by itself is not thicker than water.  If any commitment can be said to transcend the differentials in blood-lineage, surely adoption does.  To which watch such families interact is to behold love between parent and child in its most pristine form.

So by now, we in the West all know that Madonna has adopted or is in the throes of adopting a Malawian child, Malawi being one of the poorest countries in the world.  Some will no doubt object to the fact that she is white and the child is black.  I will not even dignify this line of thought with an argument.  The objection is absurd; for parental love knows no phenotypical boundaries.

But the way of I have just put the issue does point to my concern.  How is that we are told that Madonna has adopted the child, who is name is David?  Should we not be told that Madonna and Guy Ritchie have adopted David?  But then Mr. Ritchie has expressed concerns about her motives.

To be sure, I understand that it is Madonna’s name that is the media draw; and it does not phase me one iota that it is “Madonna and Guy Ritchie” rather than Mr. and Mrs. Ritchie or whatever.  But presumably we are talking about a family.  And if so, then the news ought be that Madonna and Ritchie have adopted David rather than that Madonna did so.  And if Madonna wanted it that way, surely that is the way it would have been.  This ought to be about family and not about Madonna.  To be fair, I have seen one story that speaks of the two of them adopting.  And I presume that there are other stories that report the event that way.  But the overwhelming majority of the reports tell the story as if it were all about Madonna.

David Banda, the child’s full name, is a human being—not a trophy or a prop for Madonna.

Now, there is another reason why the matter has a morally unsavory odor to it.  It is wonderful that David and Madonna seem to have bonded from the outset.  But David’s father is alive.  So, there is the issue of taking the child away from the father when it is far from obvious that this is the only option.  Of course, we are told that the father is very, very happy for his child.  And it is easy enough to see how this sentiment could be ever so genuine.  The father’s very own reaction is quite consistent with being a loving parent.

Still, there is the issue of the child and father being separated, when it is far from obvious that this is the only option.  Then, too, there issue of children with no parents at all.  To be sure, David was in an orphanage.  But imagine that you are about to adopt a child from an orphanage and take her or him to an entirely different when country when you learn that one of the child’s parents is alive.  Would that not give you pause?  Not to pause here would reveal that one is more than a little too self-absorbed.

For one thing, there is the issue of destabilizing the community.  If a child with no parents is adopted, it is next to impossible for inappropriate feelings to get off the ground towards the children who go without be adopted.  But what we have is the rather different case where everyone in the village knows that Yohane Banda son, David, has been adopted.  There is now a living person who be the target of inappropriate feelings: envy, jealousy, anger, and so forth.  To be sure, Yohane did nothing wrong.  But there is the problem of what John Rawls (in A Theory of Justice, 1971) calls excusable envy.  Why should Yohane’s son be the beneficiary of such extraordinary good fortune whilst the children of others are still wallowing in abject poverty?

The point I have just made is a philosophical point.  But one does not have to be a philosopher to appreciate the proposed arrangement would make things awkward, as we say in common parlance, for Yohane Banda.  After all, there is no prize that Yohane or David won in an open context.

Rather, things like this: Queen Madonna, in the name of displaying good will, simply chose one person’s child among all the children who still have living parents.  And while strictly speaking there is no injustice here, what we have is a considerable impropriety.

Suppose that I merely walked into my large Ethics & Value Theory class of 400 students and gave $1000 to one of my students.  It is my money; and there is a straightforward sense in which I can give my money to whom I please.  This truth, alas, does nothing to militate against the impropriety of what I have done.  There is a way of being kind that can, in fact, generate ill-will.  When everyone is more or less equally in need, then a person who merely distributing a benefit arbitrarily to one individual can occasion considerable ill-will among the others precisely because there is no way for them to make sense of themselves not getting the award.  This is why contests, even the silliest ones, can be so important; for they allow for differentiations between people that more or less clear to all.

I suspect that Madonna is a tad too besotted with herself to see that she has set the stage for such ill-will in the Malawian village from which David Banda comes.

My illustration of meagerly $1000 shows in no uncertain terms that even when we are committed to displaying goodwill, we must be mindful of the way in which we go about doing so.  For the ideal should be to do so without creating grudges among others.  Perhaps all the folks of Yohane’s village will be incredibly happy for him.  But history shows that such magnanimity is rare among human beings, especially when the differential is so great.

I dare say that she could helped significantly helped the entire village without making a dent in her bank account.

But she went “shopping” for a child to adopt.  And when I consider the manner in which she proceeded, I am struck by how much it resembles shopping for a commodity.  When they wish to do so, high profile figures are quite capable of being discreet.  They have the money, which affords them the means, to be discreet if they so choose.

So what were Madonna’s motives?  Was it to show herself to the world as a marvelous humanitarian?  Was it to call attention to the poverty in Africa?  Was it to enhance her public image?  It is known that Guy Ritchie was not at all thrilled about the matter, at least initially.  Indeed, as I have already noted, precisely what he has worried about is the issue of her motives.

Adoption at its best is one of the most altruistic acts to be performed by one human being for another.  It is an extraordinary expression of the power of human beings to love one another.  And love at its best does not need a publicist.  But Madonna did; and this tells me something rather unsavory about her motives.  Had we all learned about the matter after the fact, there would have been a propriety to it all that would have sanctified her gesture.  What we get instead is what looks like a self-centered woman using another human being to enhance her image while exploiting the impoverished standing of a village.

Aristotle famously wrote that a person who has no need of friends is either a beast or a god.  This is a strikingly strong statement.  And while we may all pay lip service to it, I wonder just how many of us actually believe it.  This is certainly so when we consider Aristotle’s conception of a good friend.  For that is a virtuous person.  Do we really believe, then, that in the absence of a friendship with a virtuous person life lacks something so fundamental that our very humanity is called into question?

Certainly, when we look around us, the evidence points in the opposite direction; for strong bonds between corrupt individuals abound.  This suggests, then, that a great many people believe that Aristotle in fact got it wrong.

But Aristotle seems to have been as insightful about friendship as anyone has ever been.  So if he is mistaken that is extremely significant.

I want to read Aristotle as follows: (1) No one can live well unless he can trust himself.  (2) No one can live as well as he could live if there are not fundamental respects in which he can trust another to the very same degree that he can trust himself.  (3) The more a person can trust another to the extent that he can trust himself, the deeper the friendship.

Anyone of the above theses may be true or false.  A person need not be able to trust himself.  And this may be true in fundamental respects.  Some cannot trust themselves around alcohol.  Others cannot trust themselves alone around another’s spouse.  Others cannot trust themselves alone around a person’s money.  And so on.  Truth be told, there are lots and lots of important respects in which people cannot trust themselves.

Now, being able to trust oneself is not the same thing as having a kind of rule rigor mortis.  One does not trust one self if fear of getting caught, for instance, is the primary explanation for one’s behavior.  For trust and prediction do not amount to the same thing.  I may predict that the Nazi will kill the Jew.  But there is no trust on my part here.  Likewise, I may predict that I will not consume any alcohol.  But there is no trust here by me of me if fear of getting caught is the primary motivating factor.  After all most, people who are addicted can make all sorts of predictions about themselves.  Indeed, they can often predict that they will not follow through with the commitment they made to rid themselves of the drug in question.  Prediction is not trust.

The point here is that being able to trust oneself speaks to something that is extremely significant, in a most positive way, about one’s character.  For this speaks to a moral power that one has with regard to exercising self-control.  And a person who cannot exercise considerable self-control with respect to his life is much more like a beast than a human, though presumably he stops considerably short of approximating a god.

Now, I take the following to be true: an axiom of the moral personality, if you will.  (4) No one who has considerable self-command over his life, and so who can trust himself enormously, would ever choose to give up that self-command, and so the wherewithal to trust himself.  That would be rather like choosing to be a puppet.  And no one can rationally make that choice if he has considerable command over, as it were, the strings of his life.

Another way of putting the preceding point is that no one who has considerable self-command could fail to value the fact that his life is so structured, no more than a healthy person could fail to value the fact that he is healthy.

This perhaps brings to what is sublime.  Our sense of what it is to be healthy is majestically informed by what we see going on around us.  If we saw only healthy people, we would still grasp that we are healthy.  But there is no doubt about the fact that seeing unhealthy people underwrites our appreciation of being healthy.

So it is with self-command.  We certainly know what it is to exercise control over our lives simply in virtue of acting.  But when we see the difference between those who have self-command and those who lack it, then those have self-command come to have an appreciation that is just that much richer—an appreciation that we could not quite have in the absence of the contrast.

No doubt one can appreciate the next move: Our having self-command is a contingent feature of our humanity.  We were not born with it.  Rather, we acquired it.  So we can lose it.  Surely no one who has considerable self-command would want to interact with any person who would contribute to his loosing that self-command.  Given that friends have enormous influence in one another’s lives, then it would be foolish to choose for a friend someone who lacked self-command if one possesses it in abundance.  For that would be rather like choosing for a friend someone who would diminish one’s moral personality.  No one would knowingly do that.  And there is no need to add here “no sane person”, since to begin with the insane person is lacking in this regard.

So the following saying has more truth to it than many of us suppose: Birds of a feather flock together.  People with strong ties as friends, as opposed to mere associates, tend to be equal with respect to their level of self-command.

But why the need for friendship?  The answer more or less drops out of what has been said.  Self-command is to living what language is to speaking.  Practice makes perfect.  And there is no better conduit for perfecting our self-command, then the trust of a friend who has considerable self-command.  Together, then, two friends with extraordinary and equal self-command provide one another with a most remarkable opportunity for moral excellence—an opportunity that cannot be had otherwise.

The gods necessarily have all the excellences that are appropriate to them.  Beasts do not know what excellences that they have or do not have.  On the one hand, human beings do not necessarily have all the excellences that are appropriate to them; on the other, they can be poignantly aware of what to strive for.  Friendship at its best reflects this insight.  What better evidence can we have that we are justified in trusting ourselves than that someone with extraordinary self-command deems us trustworthy?  The answer is very simple: None.