Education is a fine thing. And some like to esteem themselves for having attended and graduated some college or university. But I have found that a formal education – with a nod to its basic usefulness – is less important than the predilection of finding deeper and more instructive understandings in everyday occurrences.
In the 1990s, I remember arriving at the school where I worked and talking with a teacher who had had a very bad day. She was in a foul mood. She was white, and the person who had so grievously disgusted her was surely a teenage African-American student. And she said to me, “I think someday God’s going to do something about this, and there’s going to be a big flush.” And I recall in that in the moment I said to her, “I don’t think like that.”
What I took from that experience and other similar experiences was that we feel anger, frustration, disgust, dissatisfaction, and other disagreeable emotions, and we target human beings in our frustration, as if life would somehow be better and purer if only I could expeditiously kill this irritating person in front of me. The lady who made the “flush” remark had an adult daughter who was then finished with college and newly married and beginning a wonderful life of infinite opportunity. And after she uttered her shameful remark, it immediately occurred to me that when she fancied this “flush”, she believed all the while with the most unalloyed fervency that her daughter would be exempted from the flushing. It is only them that get flushed, and the us that remain unsullied.
And in these vulgar conjurations, these culturally accommodated distinctions between us and them, we bring little bits of hopelessness into the world. And the lady who works in a school only as a teacher never recognizes that hers is also a sort of sordid midwifery.
The hostile distancing between people is not as necessary as it may at first seem. Firstly, we need to remove people from desperate circumstances. The very poor and very hungry are not likely inclined to very uprightness. Secondly, we can, and should, improve upon the compassionate connectedness between people in our society. I recall a day in summer in 1986 when the temperature outside my New Jersey apartment was probably 95 degrees F, and I knew that a man was working on something in the basement of the building, and the downward steps to that basement were at the front of the building. I thought that if it were 95 degrees outside, it must be far over 110 in that basement. And in my compassion for that human being (not even knowing whether it was a young or old person, a man or a woman), I poured a large glass of ice water and headed outside. Sure enough, the man emerged, dripping and gasping as I approached him. I gave him the glass and he thanked me in a moderate way that showed how reduced he was by the heat. But I really needed no thanks. My awareness of what he surely needed was my motivation, not any affirming comment from him.
There have been many experiences in my life where I recall feeling astonished that a person did not seem embarrassed to be occupied in some behavior that was shameful. And I marveled that the person could behave in such a way. It seemed one thing to be doing something that was itself unworthy, and another thing to do it absent the flush of embarrassment.
These experiences caused me to reflect on my own experiences and realize that life is this sort of admixture of halting efforts at dignity and worth and simultaneous wonderings and inadequate appreciation of the social impact, the wider worth. Embarrassment is a skill, I concluded, and I am glad I have this skill. We may not be happy in the experience of embarrassment, but there is something decidedly propitious in it: all hope is traceable to the conviction that there are sublime principles and spirits beyond our little selves.
Reading books about the American antebellum period and studying the behaviors of debauched people such as slavers, I came to the opinion that people are incredibly adroit in their cogitation. They can rationalize literally anything.
And we do this today.
I have such great respect for the European Union. And, together with Canada, I think that the EU can be a force to appreciably improve human rights around the world.
But I recently read of a study in England (where there has been no death penalty since 1965) where 51% of the respondents (incredibly!!!) said they approved of the death penalty. Astonishing that only 49% could have had an appreciable understanding of the success that England has had with abolition. Their murder rate is far, far lower than the United States – which has killed far over a thousand people since 1965. And England’s murder rate is lower year after year after year, and has been much lower for decades.
The truth is, we don’t flush with our faces enough, and we flush humans often and in error. How embarrassing it would be to realize that you merely want to act out and to violently express your own very personal outrage, and you don’t really give much of a damn about something so far off as a stinking murder rate!
And it is this tendency of humans, so ignorant and so much lamentable, that stands athwart our likelihood of progressing peacefully and hopefully through the next several centuries. It seems to suffice with us to point to the conspicuous immorality of the dastardly terrorist and the wanton mass murderer and wholly acquit ourselves of any error in ourselves in the treatment of them. If they’re bad, our flush-exempted brain badly ratiocinates, our abuse of them must be good, and if they are very bad, our maltreatment of them is surely very good.
And if it is really such an elevated intellectual thing, if it cannot be gained by simple observation that there is some detraction brought anew into the world with every impulse of maliciousness, in every sphere and every instance – yes, even in response to wickedness – then we are improbably to succeed to august civilization. A universe flush with inexorable causation tells that we are thus likely, in our tireless simplemindedness, to flush ourselves unawares.