In Praise of Great Men and Women

I’d like to look a little more closely at my last example: if your tribe is leading you into conflict with a person of integrity, should this not be a signal that you have gone off the rails? If we are known by the company we keep, we hold each other’s values and integrity in trust. I depend on my community to notice when I stray and pull me back, and vice versa. Despite all our individual failings, and recognizing that any of us can stumble, still we are moral touchstones for each other.

(Fifth in a series that starts >here<)

Someone in my community was once complaining about how Richard, a friend of ours, was doing them wrong in some way. My response was, “If you have two explanations for a situation and one of them is that Richard is doing something nefarious and the other is anything else at all, go with the second.” I didn’t really need to hear the details. Richard had built up enough credit that the presumption of integrity was on his side.

I always felt that that should have been Obama’s response about his pastor Jeremiah Wright. Stephanopolous asked, “Do you think Wright loves his country as much as you do?” (Embarrassingly stupid question.) Obama’s answer should have been, “Jeremiah Wright served his country in combat as a pastor in the army. Since then everything he’s done has been in service to his community. He has lived his entire life in service to his country. I don’t think I have standing to question his patriotism. And neither do you.”

Or Desmond Tutu, in the debates over ordaining gays in the Episcopal Church. I had my own arguments about the rights and wrongs of that controversy back when it was burning hot; but ending up on the same side as Desmond Tutu gives me confidence I haven’t wandered too far from the straight and narrow.

Same with Mueller. Here’s a man who has spent his life fighting bad guys. He’s universally praised for his integrity. He led the FBI under Democrats and Republicans with honor. In a healthy country, attacking him only because you don’t like his current investigation—assigned to him within the past year—should make a laughingstock of his attacker, not of him. In a healthy country, great people would be recognized, honored, and given the credit they’ve earned. (And by “great” I mean the ordinary, everyday greatness that is all around us but under-recognized. A lifetime of service. The adulation of peers not out of friendship or toadyism but because they recognize quality.)

This requires a healthy dose of humility—the willingness to look to others for guidance. Ulysses S. Grant, in his memoirs, talks of how he has never taken great pride in showing off his uniform since the day he first got it, wore it everywhere, and was made fun of. The people making fun of him were not important—a street urchin and a groom—but he was willing to use their mockery as a corrective to his own behavior.

I can’t help but connect his behavior here to his thoughts about the Mexican-American war (“the most unjust war ever waged”) or on slavery. There’s an element of empathy here—of emotionally connecting with other humans to see them as equals, at some fundamental level. That empathy acts as a corrective and also provides an opening for sympathy.

We live in a crude age. The ability to recognize greatness and honor it without making the person in question a god or insisting they must be perfect is, for the most part, beyond us. Because, as someone said, all your heroes betray you sometime. No one is perfect always. Slavishly following a great man or woman is just as bad as slavishly following a tribe. But the cynical inability to recognize and celebrate the virtues of others might well be worse.

(To be continued)