"Behold the dreamer cometh; Come now therefore and let us slay him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams".
These words are written on the Martin Luther King memorial mural in Newtown, Sydney Australia, and taken from Genesis 37:19-20. Painted illegally in an act of resistance to apathetic power and the power of apathy by Juilee Pryor and Andrew Aiken in 1991 in a protest for indigenous and racial justice. Juliee Pryor, who I wish I knew more about, wrote a thesis entitled How the Light Gets in. Aiken was and is a deeply devoted Christian, so I would wager the quotation is his. Lest there be any doubt, he has added a note that the words were spoken by Joseph’s fratricidal brothers.
But Aiken was himself the murderer of a dreamer- the busker Lawrence McDonagh, who he killed in an argument with a hammer about a year before painting the mural. Eventually, he was convinced by a group called (I’m not making this up) The Twelve Tribes to turn himself in and served eight years in prison. The awful power of the words unite here a bronze age attempt at kin slaying, the assassination of Martin Luther King, centuries of oppression in Australia, and a modern killer. To see it differently, no fewer than four violent actors tried to prevent this message from reaching us, and all failed. Joseph’s brothers, the genocidal settlers of Australia, the assassin of MLK, and, finally, Aiken’s own violent act. Extraordinary coincidences aside, that’s what it’s like down here on earth. At least in my experience we’ve all been the dreamer and we’ve all been the murderous brothers at different times.
I
Maybe there are people out there truly dedicated to the good, who would stand there holding up the pillars of the world no matter what prizes were offered the lure them away, or rocks were thrown to taunt them. Maybe some of your friends are among these, but I don’t think so. Even if some of them are, there’s still the question of how to feel about the rest of humanity.
Almost all societies in recorded history have made a collective decision to devote themselves to evil. That decision was not made fairly or democratically, to be sure, but most of us have assented nonetheless. Most societies with writing have been built on slavery of one form or another. The society you’re in right now is, among other things, a society that knowingly makes people homeless, violently prevents them from accessing shelter, and scarcely even talks about this. It can be a violent and lonely place of fiefdoms held against the hungry.
Had they been born at the wrong time and place your friends would be sneering nobles, efficient slavers, raping Vikings, pogrom mobs, or casual genociders. Had your friends been born in 1903 Germany to a wealthy, conservative, rural family, the vast majority of them, would not have been resistance fighters under the Third Reich they might have held private reservations but that’s unlikely.
Perhaps you think this is okay because if your friends had been born in these circumstances, they wouldn’t really be the people you call your friends. So let us move back to the present day. Your friends would wrong you- really wrong with you, and without a good excuse- were the circumstances wrong, the right stimulus, chosen with laser focus, would make them do knowing great evil to you, or at least to others.
But all of this applies to you too, and you probably know that. You’re run through with good and evil. You could be induced to do evil, no, let’s say instead you really might be induced to do evil, though you do try not to it is a live possibility with pretty good odds. You’ve got a whole life you have to live before you’re free of that possibility. That’s what it’s like down here on earth.
II
The term moral luck is used by philosophers for, among other things, being good by chance. If I am right, a lot of what we call goodness is built on moral luck.
In light of the human capacity for evil, you face a choice, perhaps the original ethical aesthetic choice. It’s tricky because we tend to regard an admixture of filth and beauty as filth. If it’s only good fortune that has prevented someone from seriously and culpably harming you, we tend to hold that against them. In light of this, you have to choose how you stand in relation to humanity and to yourself.
Here are your options:
A) You can despise humanity in total including yourself.
B) You can love and esteem humanity generally, despite its flaws, and what anyone might do to you or others, were things different. You can decide that humanity as a whole is worth loving.
C) You can give up the very idea of this kind of valuing persons - of esteeming humanity and people, either well or poorly. This seems sad to me because many kinds of loving involve esteeming someone morally.
D) You can hate humanity, but convince yourself that you and your friends are somehow more than human. This is ridiculous on its face, though people have tried- e.g. by claiming that their rarefied genes, upbringing or religious beliefs have made them more than the rabble.
E) You can try to draw a non-arbitrary line of ‘not too bad’ around a portion of humanity that includes yourself and your friends, but not your enemies, even though you know little about what you are capable of in the different circumstances, very little at all of your friends, and probably even less of your enemies. This is by far the most popular option, but it doesn’t seem workable to me. You can’t calculate the extent of someone’s moral luck, or how far their circumstances have made virtue or vice easy for them.
Take your own case. You don’t know how much or how little it would take to make you do wrong, across the range of possible ways your life could turn out. You don’t even really know why you do things. It could be that, in most circumstances, you would be a rotten egg, but an intricate series of events have (thus far) kept you on the straight and narrow. Chance encounters. Missed meetings in which you would have said something you really regret. You draw a line marking you and the ones you like out as virtuous at great epistemic peril. There are many kinds of wrongdoing, life is very long, and possibilities stretch out in an omnidimensional space. I reiterate that it’s not just that someone with your genetic code, born in a very different time and place or stolen as a baby would have done wrong. I strongly suspect that you, as you are right now, could be induced to do terrible things by the wrong sequence of events.
Maybe this sounds abstract and out there. Surely there are better and worse people? Certainly, but it’s always seemed to me that, in at least some cases, not all that much divides the better from the worse, and a lot of that is unknown to us. Sometimes our perception hinges on something as simple as how the consequences of an action play out. The line is very thin, and it’s very hard to know the moral profile of someone’s deeds let alone how fragile or robust this profile is.
You meet people, sometimes, who are always trying to draw a line between the good ones and the bad ones. Then they see, or imagine, a glimpse of what one of ‘the good ones’ could do, and they turn on them, suddenly marking them out as filled with evil. This is not as irrational as sometimes made out. It’s genuinely terrifying, and infuriating, to see the ways your friends would betray you, were things a little different, or even to see the ways you would betray you, were things a little bit different. Those, like me, whose natural instinct is to shrug and say some tripe about how the heart contains both good and evil are saying, when you think about it, something weird. Our friends contain treason, and we’re okay with it. We contain treason, and while we’re working on it, that’s just the way things are. Maybe this line is right but it’s a much more grave matter than usually made out. One is reminded of the Mormon line on art and relationships they consider sinful: “You wouldn’t eat a cake with a little bit of dog poop in it”. This is the default human view on things that contain foulness- that’s why the metaphor works, even though it has done so much harm.
So if we reject D&E- strategies that aim to single out a special moral elect-, we are left with A, B and C, and it seems to me that the choice between these can only be an ethical-aesthetic argument, the kind of debate that is pursued by poems and parables rather than analytic prose. There are reasons to be given, but rhyme and reason aren’t separate here. I suppose you could try to do some kind of statistical weighing up- or imagine some ‘fair circumstance’ that would decide whether good or evil is ultimately more weighty, but this seems to me like just another aesthetic choice. I’m not trying to be difficult here. I simply can’t imagine how you could make this choice- whether to love or be revolted by humanity as a whole- except by a decision of feeling.
III
Forgiveness and gratitude are interesting notions here. The fact that people could- by a fluctuation of circumstances, be induced to wrong you or anyone else, needs forgiveness, but of a strange kind. Similarly, the fact that someone’s goodness is fragile, down to chance, undermines our gratitude to them, but in an odd way. I hope to write more about forgiveness and gratitude in this context in a future essay.
Do you forgive humanity as a whole? I think you should make that choice. Maybe you can’t choose though. Some people claim to be able to exercise a great degree of control over their feelings, some none at all. If you’ll allow me, I’ll put a little weight on the scales of the heart.
IV
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.
-Marx
I’ve left out the famous bit, the bit you’d probably recognize, because you’ve seen it enough times, that point has already been made. I’d add that all suffering - especially suffering made public- is a protest against suffering.
My answer is that you should appreciate humanity, despite the fragility of goodness, because some people are struggling to do the right thing despite great suffering, and I don’t think they should be despised.
There’s a kind of person who struggles publicly trying to live a good life in a broken world despite endless suffering. They may not manage to do good, but we know they’re trying. I can’t sneer at that. Their life, in a peculiar sense, is a sacrifice aiming to vindicate humanity. No wonder then that Jesus is one of the type specimens. History is littered with them, from Simone Weil to Willem Arondeus to Malala Yousafzai or Sophie Scholl. But some of the most interesting cases aren’t usually considered great moral heroes. Indeed, they may not even be possessed of extraordinary virtue- it’s hard to know. They’re people just trying to be good and suffering. Often, when they come to our attention, it is because they are artists [only those who stand out in some way get noticed- a major, if tautological, problem]. I might mention, for example, Sinead O’Connor, Leonard Cohen or Tracy Chapman.
But consider Sufjan Stevens, born in 1975. Now that all of my dreams have been confiscated Circa 1975/Now that it's too late to have died a young man. A very private person, despite grounding his life’s work in autobiography I don’t wanna live inside of that flame. He wrestles with the exact problems we are describing in this essay- of John Wayne Gacy jr he sings And in my best behavior/I am really just like him/ Look beneath the floor boards/For the secrets I have hid. His mother left him while he was a child We were ashamed of her. He wrestles with a number of mental illnesses, the exact nature of which has not been disclosed I search for the capsule I lost & The murdering ghost you cannot ignore. Although I would not claim to know much about the details, he has obviously grappled with tensions between his Christian faith and his sexuality I see the Wasp on the length of my Arm. He is a survivor of domestic abuse The strength of his arm My lover/Caught me off guard. He has recently lost his partner and developed Guillian-Barre Syndrome. Beyond that, the moments of his ordinary suffering are numberless- he wrestles, as we all do, with the consciousness of fading youth and growing age, My fading supply. He wrestles with his faith Lord, I no longer believe/ Drowned in living waters. He wrestles & he wrestles.
I sometimes think that Sufjan Stevens is, in a very real sense, suffering for humanity. He would not, I think, like that statement. He does not want to be your personal Jesus. But, with all my respect, it doesn’t really matter whether he wants to be thought of in that light or not for once your life was sold it could never be possessed. Perhaps he would be comforted to learn, that the reason his public suffering and ethical struggle draw my attention is not what’s exceptional about them, but what’s commonplace. Add it all together and it’s a strange story, to be sure, but he’s just some dude who lives in Holland Michigan, writes sad songs, has suffered, and tries his best to be good. If the art is brilliant, it’s not that the suffering is particularly ‘‘‘fine’’’- it’s that all suffering should be opposed with such an eloquent protest.
As long as compassion exists, all public suffering is a protest against suffering, an attempt to gather support to abolish it, reduce it, ameliorate it - to do something. My interest here though is that everyone, who suffers and tries to do good and suffers because they try to do good- it seems to me uniquely difficult to sneer at these people or even, as per option C, not to recognize the goodness inherent in their attempts to do right. Even if that attempt-at-goodness-in-the-mud is fragile and situationally contingent, you’d have to be a clod not to appreciate it. Some people are out there dreaming of a better world and trying to build it. Could you despise that, even if you wanted to?
If, as I have argued, moral luck means we have to value humans as a whole and can’t just chop out a good part and a bad part, it follows that to be grateful for anything, we have to, in some sense, forgive the cruelties of humanity as a whole. I find myself forgiving those cruelties, so I can be grateful for people who try to do good under difficult circumstances, even if they don’t succeed. How can you look at your fellow creatures trying despite the weight and cold and not love them, even if the goodness they have is fragile and contingent, and even if there are many others who are not trying? It doesn’t matter that circumstances could alter who is trying to be good and some are not, and the capacity to try is somewhat random. Some people are struggling out there to bring good into the world, thus we should love them, and since they are not split out from humanity as a whole except by chance, we must love humanity as a whole. This is pretty silly and maudlin, but it works for me and lets me love humanity despite the fragility of goodness and the vagaries of moral luck.
V
To summarise briefly and more personally, I do not think people are divided into the good and bad. If they are, I don’t think I have a hope of knowing where to draw the line. This has forced me to choose where I stand on humanity as a whole. Since I cannot reject those elements of humanity who are trying, really trying, to be good despite suffering, even if that good is fragile and contingent, I have to love humanity as a whole. I have to engage in an act of original forgiveness- forgiving myself and others, so I can be grateful. Aligning myself on the side of humanity in total. I’m still trying to do this every day, but it’s hard because one always wants to split out a hateful portion, but any other way would be harder still.
There is something to love about a tumor. It tries so very hard to eek out its existence and live its best possible life. They’re so successful, tumors, they send off little agents waiting to sprout like seeds and grow, and grow, and grow, and grow, ad infinitum. How big has little HeLa grown, now that she’s been released from her original packaging?
It’s just a tumor. Give it special significance and it’s still a tumor that will eventually disrupt the critical systems that feed it. I think it’s fair to assert that tumors are pretty obvious in the larger body of humanity once they’ve settled in and gotten comfortable, begun to metastasize a little, really spread its tendrils.
I love this tumor, it feeds me and gives me a life of higher comfort and heights of consumption. I need it to live. At this point to remove the tumor would be to remove critical systems of support for the larger body.
We would never survive its removal, and if we did we would likely succumb to the diseases of our ancestors.
Let’s redeem this tumor, by loving it and seeing its place in ourselves. Only a callous or blind person would choose to remove the poor little tumor, for it is no longer a parasite, but a lesser manifestation of ourselves.
I would like to conclude with a genuine thanks to Henrietta Lacks, who’s immortality would probably not be possible without capitalism. A shout out also to my homie capitalism, where the racism that justifies the exploitation of people like Henrietta is a feature not a bug, just another determinant in this moral luck that sounds a lot like fatalism.
Also ffs some self awareness, if you don’t know what you’re made of morally get out there and find out. accept it or change it whatever we’re all god’s little tumors or whatever
Representing option C, subjective reality is full of love and beauty but damned if it isn’t rare in a bunch of self important apes. Animism makes lumps of flesh in a deterministic reality as redeemable as rocks. Don’t blame the rock that shattered your window, blame god.
Seriously this is fun and the second time I wanted to leave you a tip and didn’t want to put my credit card info into whatever that is you use for reader support. Make it easier and I got a $40 tip for you PB. Get out there and have an ethical end of the run salmon dinner on me.