Some of us are imprisoned by iron and stone, some by cages erected in our own minds. When you are so identified with your own story that you can admit no other truth, pain owns your vision. The only antidote is awareness, which can sometimes be activated by glimpsing a wider lens (check out the wise writings I’ve linked at the end of this post).

I’ve put off writing about Israel and the Gaza flotilla, even though they are much in my mind, because I didn’t want to rattle people’s reactivity, unleashing the friend-or-foe perspective so often seen through the lens of pain. But then this statement was posted to a progressive Jewish e-list: “Maybe I live too much now in the 1930’s and am experiencing these times as 1938.”

Since Israeli troops landing on the Mavi Marmara at the end of May killed nine protestors, there has been a flood of such messages. When online exchanges reach a certain level of impassioned belligerence, I can’t help myself: I have to stop lurking and chime in. Last week, I posted twice to the aforementioned e-list. I’m going to include excerpts from my messages, so you can judge for yourself the character of my statements.

The day after the Mavi Marmara incident, I wrote in hope of short-circuiting an escalating competition, in which political disagreement had devolved to ad hominem challenges. One list member posed to another a set of questions mimicking his own draft board’s interrogation during the Vietnam era. In those days, draft boards asserted that one couldn’t support a claim for exemption from the draft on the grounds of conscientious objection unless absolute pacifism was proven. They commonly asked young men if they would rise in defense if their mothers or sisters were attacked by a rapist. A “Yes” would disqualify them for C.O. status. The aim was to authorize as few C.O.s as possible, so draft boards set the bar sky-high by focusing on purely personal questions, even though the issue was conscientious objection to war. My response included these paragraphs:

Now, the world faces an explosive international incident around the Israeli raid on the flotilla attempting to break the Gaza blockade, and part of this online dialogue seems to be turning on challenges to individuals very like the challenges draft boards issued to applicants for conscientious objector status 45 years ago. Why? My guess is that it is so much easier to focus on such detail than on the real and painful questions at hand. In such situations, what happens between individuals does seem to mirror the larger debate: loudly opposing opinions fill the air. Each side cites history in its defense. Accusations of bad faith and hypocrisy are flung. Everything seems to turn on details, while the big picture is lost.

As always, many things are true simultaneously. Israel has taken steps that now attract a flood of horrified criticism. (Personally, the best light I can put on this is as a grotesque miscalculation in the service of a counter-productive policy, but the details of my opinions don’t matter any more than any other individual’s.) There is no question that world opinion judges Israel more harshly than other nations, and people feel the unfairness of this. In the U.S., many people focus on Israel’s transgressions with a vigor and venom that far exceeds the attention they give to other nations’ misdeeds, including their own. Some people seem to think the remedy for this is to back off, granting Israel the same indifference that allows other nations to imprison, kill, or torture with impunity. To me, it seems quite clear the moral response is to hold all nations to the same high standards.

A few days later, I wrote again in response to a list member posting a Web page picturing market stalls in Gaza, heaped high with food and consumer goods. This elicited bitter sarcasm about the need for aid. I used a Web utility to translate the page from Arabic, learning that the photos had been taken in November 2009, during preparations for Eid ul-Fitr, the festival marking the end of Ramadan. My message pointed out that no picture tells the whole story (in most American cities, for instance, it is possible to take pictures of extreme abundance, then drive a short way and capture images of blocks that resemble the aftermath of bombing raids); and that if abundant market stalls are a reason to withhold aid, then it should be withdrawn from many relatively prosperous countries, including Israel. I continued:

Third, intimating that aid is conditioned entirely on economic need evades the underlying questions raised by a blockade, which have more to do with autonomy, access, and freedom of movement than with the availability of fresh fruit. Whether or not you think the evidence is there to support dire economic need is one question. Whether or not you support the boycott is another. Would you willingly submit to a blockade so long as you had enough consumer goods? Most of us value our freedom more than that.

Finally, if you think it is valid to question aid based on indicators of material need, then it is your obligation to consult agencies and indicators that offer fuller and more objective evidence. There are many international bodies, both secular and faith-based, that publish regular reports on poverty levels and other measurable indicators. If you want to challenge aid to Gaza (or Israel, or any nation) based on these, that is at least defensible. This is not.

After each message, I received quite a few private replies thanking me for offering a balanced perspective, while a couple of people replied to the whole list defending Israel against the attack they perceived in my words. I feel certain that the positive responses were private because their authors did not wish to open themselves to censure from those who view the world through pain-ground lenses, those who experience all divergent views as attacks.

The person who compared our own times to 1938 wasn’t responding to me, but to another contributor who’d posted a condemnation of a crude video parody of “We Are The World,” portraying anti-blockade protestors as con artists.

In Germany in 1938, a nearly unanimous popular referendum granted sole political power to the Nazi Party and approved the annexation of Austria. The terrible pogrom of Kristallnacht initialized the binge of killing, imprisonment, and confiscation that led to systematic genocide, with the SS, Gestapo, and Hitler Youth rounding up 30,000 Jews in a single night for shipment to concentration camps.

It takes my breath away to imagine viewing the world through the lens of inherited pain that distorts the present climate for Israel into something that can be compared to that defining moment, the last German election until the war’s end, in which a vast population consented to tyranny and gorged on blood.

But the legacy of inherited pain isn’t confined to Jews. This distorted vision is epidemic, virulent, and terrifyingly widespread around the globe, affecting Israelis, diaspora Jews, Palestinians, and their advocates along with so many others. It generates a chain-reaction, with each set of blind spots and reactivity triggering the other. Outside the Mideast, the war of words escalates; on the ground, the weapons are more damaging, but the pattern is the same.

The miracle and saving grace is that not everyone has succumbed. I want to commend you to three pieces of writing that shed light, by authors who perceive many shades of truth, not just black and white.

On June 1, the New York Times published an op-ed by Israeli writer Amos Oz, whose family emigrated to Israel from Eastern Europe in the mid-1930s, warning of the intoxication with force and its consequences. On the same day, U.S. journalist George Packer posted a New Yorker blog entitled, “Israel Takes the Bait.”

On June 5th, Israeli writer Uri Avnery, whose family fled to Israel from Nazi Germany, who founded the peace organization Gush Shalom, published a remarkable essay about the British blockade intended to prevent ships of Holocaust survivors from landing in Palestine, and how it backfired. That same day, the 86 year-old author was physically attacked as he attempted to make his way home from a large peace demonstration in Tel Aviv’s Museum Square.

Each piece’s perspective is its author’s, none identical, but they all make the point that certainty of one’s rightness (and of the other’s evil) is dangerous to both parties’ well-being, and indeed, to survival. The danger applies equally to those who see Israel as justified in any action they deem defensive (which too often includes all actions); to those who excuse suicide bombings; to those who ignore the damage done by our own nations’ definition of national and corporate interest. The Sermon on the Mount seems apt: “First cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

In any debate conducted in the polarized light of lenses ground by pain, one evergreen tactic is questioning people’s right to an opinion. If you don’t live here, each person says, pointing to a particular patch of ground or even to a particular shape of flesh and blood, you can’t know, you can’t say, so back off and shut up. It’s an all-purpose argument that can be deployed to any end. During the sixties civil rights movement in the American South, white supremacists said this to discredit freedom riders and other northerners who came down to Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama to support the movement. Later on, Black nationalists said it to exclude white activists from a movement that they believed should be led exclusively by people subject to the oppressions it arose to defeat. Women said it to question anti-choice men’s right to have a say on abortion. Israelis say it to question others’ right to speak about their country’s policies.

So in addition to the words of Oz and Avnery, who have certainly earned their bona fides as Israelis, I want to end with a quotation from Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (commonly, Rav Kook), the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the British-controlled Palestine. He died in 1935, but his vision of righteousness still seems futuristic when compared with the policies of virtually all existing nations. These are excerpts from a longer essay which, while written with specific reference to the Jewish state, seems well worth pondering for everyone, everywhere:

There is a certain convention that has become accepted by practically the entire human race, and that is the right of every nation to aggrandize itself at the expense of other nations. Even supposedly righteous rulers are guilty of having shed blood to bring enhanced material prosperity to their nation, without so much as a thought to the havoc wreaked on surrounding nations. Even though human decency dictates that the individual not pursue success through the destruction of fellow humans, on the national level—so according to conventional wisdom—there is free license to achieve success, come what may. Even those who shun military exploits, are incapable of desiring the success of other nations to the same degree they seek their own nation’s advancement. The most righteous of individuals would find strange the thought that all human beings be given the same advantage seeing as one God created us in His image. This chauvinist thinking is so ingrained in human nature, that even the great champions of justice defend this notion by saying that the scientific and material development of the world requires that nations compete against one another.

Now one might receive the mistaken impression that the Torah endorses this attitude, whereby we should assign a greater value to our own people’s good than to the welfare of others. After all, the Torah commands the Children of Israel to conquer the land from the indigenous nations. But this is clearly unacceptable! How could God, Whose mercy extends to all His creations, oppress His own handiwork?! How could the Most High command that we remove from our hearts the well being of the entire human race for our own selfish good?! Therefore, at the time the covenant was first established with our ancestor Abraham, a divine protest was lodged: The very thought of nationalism is despicable to God, for He equates all mankind. The goal is to seek the true success of all God’s creations. True justice means that one views with equal concern the advancement of the entire human race.

If we try to see Rav Kook’s words through the lens of our own pain, they are written in invisible ink. This is my prayer, that this message will be read and heeded in my own country, the United States, in Israel, in Palestine, in all the nations of the earth. I don’t imagine it is easy to enlarge even a single individual’s sight, let alone to shift entrenched ideas of national interest, only that there is no alternative if we wish to live in peace.

All we ask of you on that day is to do an arts project, however small or big. Be creative about an issue that you believe promotes “caring and sharing.” Song, dance, theatre, draw, paint, write, make, poem, photograph, lecture, walk, tour, talk, art class, anyway that you feel you are creative!

The first years have seen WCAD grow from a celebration of Reg Bolton [a beloved community artist who passed away in 2006] to a global event from as far as Brazil, Slovenia, Scotland, Australia, USA, Ireland, Mexico and many more. All we ask of you on that day is to do an arts project, however small or large to mark this day. If you can mark the event on your website in the build up to it that would be great to. It is going to be our biggest yet.

Some people like to think of the red-carpet arts as the mainstream, relegating community arts to a puny tributary, continuously emerging but somehow never fully arrived. Just by existing, World Community Arts Day puts paid to that illusion. It is the brainchild of a passionately dedicated community artist called Andrew Crummy, who not only has established his own career in the field but has a bona fide community arts lineage. He is the son of Helen Crummy, a founder in 1962 and stalwart leader of the Craigmillar_Festival_Society, a powerful community arts program based in a tough public housing estate in Edinburgh, Scotland. (”Housing estate” and “housing scheme” are terms used in the British Isles for what we call “housing projects” in the US.)

“Poverty,” wrote Helen Crummy in her 1992 book Let The People Sing!, “is not only lack of an adequate income to live on, it is being classed as of little or no value to society, and as such, having one’s capacity for self-fulfillment crippled from birth.”

Here’s a link to a 2004 exhibition and book that sum up the legacy, Arts: The Catalyst Craigmillar and to a lovely short film of the same name. Watch it and be inspired!

And if you’re up for more, here’s a fascinating piece from the Community Arts Network about “The Gentle Giant,” an enormous sculpture of Gulliver designed by prison artist Jimmy Boyle.

At the World Community Arts Day site, you can find news of WCAD events, texts, videos, and photos from past years. If you’re on Facebook, you can join the Facebook group and post your event(s). People have already posted images, ideas and links from every part of the world. Happy World Community Arts Day! And thanks to Helen and Andrew Crummy for inspiring the world.

Busy on the inside too. Something persuaded me that it was time to take stock, so in the interstices of my tasks (it seems I get all my thinking done in airports lately), I wrote a kind of spiritual autobiography, scrutinizing my journey thus far in the hope of discovering what I have learned. So there it is again: every moment has been instructive, of course, the delights as well as the despair, but hands down, the most important lessons have emerged from difficulty.

I’m not thrilled to be sharing this conclusion. It’s not a prescription, just an observation. If I were granted the ability to order from a menu of the future, you can be sure I’d go heavy on the bliss, perhaps including just a soupçon of suffering for piquancy and contrast. But looking at the road I’ve actually traveled, there’s no mistaking that pain has led to possibility every time.

How? Mostly by forcing me to know my own heart and mind.

Especially when I was young and very certain of what I wanted, getting it seldom taught me anything but the fleeting nature of such satisfactions. (Or as Oscar Wilde put it, “When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”) Take love, for instance. When I was young, I wished to be pursued, and I was. My experience was shaped by the desires of others. I complied, and I enjoyed, but I learned very little about my own desires until circumstance forced me to feel them. Deprivation was a far better teacher than surfeit.

I have been thinking about the way that these intimate truths, on the scale of a single human story, translate to the larger stage of a family, a circle, a community, a society. Along with countless others, I have all my life hoped and pleaded and written and spoken and agitated for a more just and humane social order. All to the good, no doubt. But when I look at President Obama’s poll numbers—the way he rises in public estimation by denouncing torture, for instance—I can’t help but think that of all things, eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration’s punishment of the Constitution was the most powerful teacher of why we should love and protect liberty.

The problem with learning through pain, though, is that sometimes the main thing we learn is to complain. Knowing what we don’t want doesn’t necessarily teach us to imagine and propose what we do desire.

I spoke on a panel recently that focused on questions of culture and public space. Naturally, I shared my thoughts about cultural recovery, all the things this nation might do to harness artists’ creative power in the service of national recovery, including putting artists to work in public service jobs. A couple of people (who personally have no need of public subsidy) spoke against public arts funding. One cited the banality of Post Office murals created during the WPA of the 1930s, another complained of aesthetic conservatism in his own city’s public art program.

The implicit basis for such arguments is what in logic is called the “nirvana fallacy” or “perfect solution fallacy,” in which some actually existing (and therefore flawed) possibility is compared with an imagined perfect ideal, and is rejected because it fails to live up.

Eliminate the nirvana fallacy (that is, admit that only imperfect solutions can ever be crafted with what Immanuel Kant characterized as the “crooked timber of humanity”), and it becomes evident that unhappiness leads to healing only if complaint leads to proposition.

Here on Planet Earth, it isn’t as if there is a perfect financing system for culture, for instance. The marketplace skews toward a form of value based on resale: will an art object gain in monetary value over time? Will a performance be resold a sufficient number of times (in concern, in a recording, in a move theater) to enrich its sponsors? Individual patronage skews toward the caprice of the patron, often entangling artists in power relationships reminiscent of sexual commerce. Corporate patronage skews toward public relations, adding to the annals of censorship—painted-over or altered murals, expurgated performances and exhibits, subsidy offered and withdrawn. Public patronage skews toward fear of controversy. No money comes without strings, and none of the strings are intrinsically more confining than the rest (although the remedies differ: in the private sector, there is little of the legal recourse we have against public-sector censorship). The main observable difference is that public support, when it has been available, has sometimes been less burdened by questions of privilege, slightly less dependent on whom one knows than what one does.

Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch—I’ve done it as much as anyone, so much I’ve finally had my fill. What shall we do instead?

My spiritual journey has led me toward my own desires, including what I want from relationship, whether love or work is the subject. In my current stage of life, where the challenge is to complete a journey toward my self (though I hope it takes a long, healthy time), I want only relationships with others who understand this truth. Have you ever been partnered on a project with someone who is most comfortable in the negative, criticizing others’ contributions? On the individual level, this is frustrating: being a good sport, responding to encouragement, you toss out an idea—and it lands like a lump of meat on the floor of the lion cage. But as a social stance, the damage that can be done by addiction to complaint is even greater, making us a nation of critics, in thrall to the nirvana fallacy, risking all that we might otherwise accomplish in exchange for yet another chance to exercise our kvetch.

I don’t want any longer to give my time and energy to that type of exercise. I want to be able to learn pain’s lessons before my head breaks from banging against the wall of my difficulties. I think it will take a great deal of restraint and awareness to implement this wish, to recognize and refuse ubiquitous opportunities for the type of relationship—whether in love, work or politics—that promises to teach a lesson I hope I have already learned, discovering oneself by encountering pain. Here in the little world as out in the big world, I hope you and I are up to it.

Well, yes, yes and yes—sometimes. Media depictions are often challenged, sometimes rightly so, for glamorizing suffering, lending comfort to those who aestheticize the pain of others rather than persuading them to extend their hands in hope of alleviating it. The nobility of the impoverished, the exquisite languor of disease—critics say that such depictions falsify the experience of pain. And it’s true: sometimes, even in the service of good intentions, we create a pornography of suffering, eliciting intense sensation disconnected from the true human feeling its makers claim to pursue.

And yet.

The opposite is also true. Yesterday I heard a gallery talk by a young artist from Shanghai, Yang Yongliang. You won’t be able to see as much detail of these images as I was, but even in a small scale, you can see this much: that the remarkably beautiful scrolls in the style of Shan Shui (mountain-water) painting with roots a thousand year’s in China’s past are actually photographic depictions of city scapes and traffic jams, of corporate cultural and environmental damage. The extreme beauty of the images opens the viewer’s heart and mind to the shock of information they convey.

Even when the story we have to tell concerns pain and destruction, even under conditions of extreme deprivation, degradation, physical agony, we human beings are capable of making and experiencing beauty, thus deriving authentic moments that transcend suffering without falsifying experience.

I’ve been tired. Stress, maybe, a touch of flu, the passing of time. I had a long wait in an airport last week, much of it spent sitting on the floor near the only electrical outlet I could see. Then a long wait on a bus while the little plane’s crew changed, and another wait for our place in the takeoff line. Once in my seat—once I’d negotiated with my restless seatmate the lowering of the armrest that protected me from his elbow—I leafed idly through a recent New Yorker, hoping it would put me to sleep.

Instead, I stumbled on a piece that awakened me in body and in mind:
Dan Chiasson’s review of a new edition of Constantine Cafavy’s poems, a review seemingly written to echo Cavafy’s tone as well as encounter his work. As Chiasson says of this multiplex poet,

When Ezra Pound called the Cantos “a poem containing history,” he exempted his poem itself from history, and the second sense of “containing” applies as well: the Cantos are a kind of quarantine of the past. But in Cavafy history is the container: individuals rattle around inside it like pennies in a can. Cavafy believed that you couldn’t “remember” history no matter what you did, and, in any case, you weren’t “condemned to repeat it,” because it had never gone away. All of the modernist sententiae about history with a capital “H” seemed silly to Cavafy, whose lovers were envoys to the whole Hellenic past.

Because everybody dwells in history together, all at once, Cavafy refused to divvy up the available moods into one pile appropriate for obscure Byzantines and other for his Alexandrian rent boys.

By the time I got to “divvy,” my mood had altered markedly. Chiasson’s review is one of the most beautiful pieces of critical writing I have read in a very long time. But what made me want to jump out of my seat, crowing, was lagniappe, a further association the review enabled me to make. Here’s is a passage from “The God Abandons Antony” in the new Daniel Mendelsohn translation of Cavafy under review:

Like one who’s long prepared, like someone brave,
as befits a man who has been blessed with a city like this,
go without faltering toward the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the entreaties and the whining of a coward,
to the sounds—a final entertainment—
to the exquisite instruments of that initiate crew,
and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria,
whom you are losing.

What an evocation of the task that is ours, whatever our triumphs, if we are allowed to live beyond them! And what a stunning moment, the tears flowing, my seatmate’s restless knees pushing me toward the aisle, when I realized that an esteemed pursuer of beauty, Leonard Cohen, had borrowed from Cavafy to build his own very different evocation of loss, “Alexandra Leaving.”

As someone long prepared for this to happen,
Go firmly to the window. Drink it in.
Exquisite music. Alexandra laughing.
Your firm commitments tangible again….

As someone long prepared for the occasion;
In full command of every plan you wrecked—
Do not choose a coward’s explanation
that hides behind the cause and the effect.

And you who were bewildered by a meaning;
Whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed—
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.

My heartbeat is loud right now, remembering this airplane ride. I would like to be able to make you feel it, the way the blood in my veins began to jump and sparkle, how my brain felt like a handful of moonlight, carelessly tossed on the tide. How beyond all else of which we are capable, our potential for kindness and generosity, for moral grandeur, for ingenuity and resourcefulness and so much else—our aptitude for beauty is what ties me to life, what makes me want it to go on and on.

There are so many silly things about the postmodern moment that may be drawing to a close. But surely the silliest must have been the questioning of beauty’s necessity in our lives, like a child holding his breath, just to be contrary.

There is a lively philosophical-scientific debate about the origins of morality and its place in our make-up. One school says it is a uniquely human and uniquely conscious creation: a system devised by humans to soften the edges of our animal natures, a rational aspiration toward our better selves.

Another—influenced by the study of social organization and altruistic behavior in primates—posits an innate basic morality akin to the innate grasp of linguistic principles described by Noam Chomsky. In each case, our minds are thought to incorporate a kind of operating system which is evoked, developed and expressed in relation to our social and cultural context. If I live in France, my underlying linguistic capacity is manifest as French in all its particularity. If I am born in a Hindi-speaking region of India, my underlying moral grammar is elaborated as one or another variation of Hindu moral codes. If I am an ape, even part of an extended family in zoo captivity, my actions will express the principle that something good obtained by one is to be shared with all.

Some people resist this idea. For them, there is a thick black line between human consciousness and animal nature. They find it repugnant or absurd to posit continuities between them.

But to me, it has the ring of truth. It gibes with the many documented instances of primate social policy (such as a bonobo acting to save a fallen bird, as cited in this very interesting New York Review essay). It also offers a plausible explanation for why people are so often unable to articulate conscious moral reasons for their feelings: “It just felt right,” they say, or “I couldn’t do it, it felt wrong.”

It if is true that we possess an inbuilt moral nature, what does that mean? If there is a basic pattern of morality embedded in our minds, how did it get there? Believers in a higher order or Spirit may see it as a divine imprint, software installed by the Creator. In Jewish mysticism, for instance, the nefesh is the coarsest level of soul, the spiritual essence residing in the body, possessed by all living beings. A higher soul, ruach, is developed as the person grows, and can be seen as something like the deepest source of personality. The neshama is the spiritual energy that pulls the lower levels toward the highest realms; it can be seen as transcending or transforming the lower levels. (There are two higher transpersonal levels, chayah and yechidah, as well.)

But it can also be argued that innate moral grammar is a practical survival skill, like the ability to run fast. Human survival is in many ways predicated on altruistic behavior: protecting the weak, facing danger or making other voluntary sacrifices on behalf of the group. Early humans who practiced this morality increased the survival chances of their genetic line, passing on the trait as cultures developed.

In truth, these two views are two different ways of expressing the same thing. Kindness (or at least a disinclination to gratuitous cruelty) and fairness make us feel better, more aligned with positive energies. That they also increase our offspring’s survival chances can be understood as a form of spiritual lagniappe, making virtue more than its own reward. Whether the product of spiritual intervention or natural selection, this innate moral grammar is part of our nature. The elaborate philosophical and social codes (and debates) of our complex societies are to this basic moral grammar as epic poetry is to language or elaborate choreography to the basic movements and gestures with which we are endowed.

How can this be true, you may ask, when everywhere we are surrounded by transgressions of even the most primitive moral principle (as Rabbi Hillel put it a couple of millennia ago), “Do not unto others that which is hateful to yourself?”

Again, we have explanations from spirituality and from science, drawing us toward the same realizations. In Jewish thought for example, humans are understood to be subject to two competing pulls, the Yetzer HaTov (Good Inclination) and the Yetzer HaRa (Evil Inclination). Gandhi put it this way: “All religions teach that two opposite forces act upon us and the human endeavour consists in a series of eternal rejections and acceptances.” In evolutionary terms, the drives to compete and dominate and to protect one’s own against outsiders are just as securely locked into our minds as the attraction of fairness and the desire to protect those in need of care. The choice between them turns on that eternal bane and delight of humankind, free will.

Even when people seem to act on the Evil Inclination, we can watch them struggle, engaging with some vestige of an innate moral structure. For instance, yesterday I spoke with a friend who teaches at a prestigious private university in a department where science, economics and public policy converge. He is African American. He described a repeated conversation he has, where he is introduced to someone who does a series of doubletakes (my friend doesn’t teach at Harvard, but I am going to use it as an example):

“You teach at Harvard?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Harvard University?”
“Yep.”
“The one in Cambridge?”
“That’s right.”
“And you have a PhD?”
And so on…

To disrupt the stream of unthinking racism, all my friend needs to do is ask one question: “Can you explain to me why you’re having such a hard time getting this?” That’s generally enough for a modicum of self-awareness to kick in, sometimes followed by a sheepish look and a stammer: the repository of moral grammar has been activated.

When people do cruel and stupid things, they often try to disguise them with a great deal of preemptive self-justification. I know two people who lost their jobs at a public institution that lost its soul trying slavishly to emulate a private corporation. They were called into a meeting and told without preliminaries that their department was being abolished, that they were to be out that day. The executioners took great pains to say their work had been excellent, exemplary, and to deflect every question about why there had been no prior consultation with a river of words: unfortunate, unavoidable, out of my hands. Later, meeting in the hallway as boxes were being carried to waiting cars, they wanted a hug!

Even the most egregious of immoral public actions, affecting whole regions and ecosystems, are couched in language suggesting that criminals in high places, like the rest of us, have to deal with the pesky voice of moral grammar. This week, a friend sent a bone-chilling clip from the New York Times announcing that the Bush administration is authorizing coal operators to blast away mountaintops to remove coal, dumping the rubble into valleys and streams. The rationale here? To “meet growing energy demands and reduce dependence on foreign oil.”

“From 1985 to 2001,” the Times says, “724 miles of streams were buried under mining waste, according to the environmental impact statement accompanying the new rule. If current practices continue, another 724 river miles will be buried by 2018.”

In an analytic piece that appeared a couple of weeks ago, administration officials justified this and other appalling mining-related decisions as needed to protect the nation:

White House and industry officials say there is a larger case to be made for coal, which fuels generators that produce half the nation’s electricity. As natural gas prices have soared, it has become much cheaper to use coal. Although pollutants from coal are among the biggest contributors to acid rain and global warming, coal is also plentiful and secure, with domestic reserves that could last for 230 years.

James L. Connaughton, the chairman of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, said the changes in the mountaintop mining rules were ”all part of the broader effort to sustain coal as a critical part of the nation’s energy mix, because it’s affordable, it’s reliable and it’s domestically secure.”

(This very interesting and detailed August 9th analysis—”MINES TO MOUNTAINTOPS: Rewriting Coal Policy; Friends in the White House Come to Coal’s Aid”—describes how millions of dollars in campaign contributions to Republicans have resulted in this and other disastrous policies. Subscribers can find it on the Times Web site.)

I accept that everyone has an innate structure of morality which expresses a higher order, whether it was installed by a Creator or developed as a survival strategy. I also accept that we have the ability to bury, suppress and deny it—to hitch our wagons to the Evil Inclination with no more than a backward glance. It keeps coming back to choice, doesn’t it? It keeps coming back to remembering our own capacity to choose and helping others to remember theirs.

The most powerful teaching on this theme I have ever heard was told by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who escaped the fate of many of his generation in World War II, emigrating to the United States. “I have always hoped,” he said (I’m paraphrasing), “that if I were to find myself among those taken into the gas chambers, that I would be able to turn to the guard who is poking his gun into my flesh, to look him in the eye and to say, ‘Despite all that you have done, I still consider you a member of the human community, and I want you to know that what you are doing is wrong, very wrong.’” I share that hope.