25. Embracing our evil to oppose it
Babies are not innocent. They’re not born innocent of human DNA, so human evil is in them from the start.
Paul Bloom says infants as young as six months make moral choices. His book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, is based on research he and his wife, Karen Wynn, conduct at Yale University’s Infant Cognition Center. They use puppets to test how babies respond to simple stories. Bloom explains that babies enjoy friendly, helpful puppets and therefore, he assumes, friendly, helpful people. By contrast, babies show a definite dislike for puppets that act mean and hurt other puppets. And the babies are happy to see the mean puppets get punished. No surprise there.
What Bloom says next I found not so much surprising as disturbing. The babies had a strong bias for puppets they identified as similar to themselves and a bias against puppets they identified as different, and they were glad to see those which were different get punished just for being different.
Sometimes the difference was based on nothing more than a trivial detail. You can see this for yourself on YouTube in a 60 Minutes piece produced by Shari Finkelstein called, “Born Good? Babies help unlock the origins of morality.” Lesley Stahl, the host, follows Karen Wynn through several of her experiments. A baby named Gregory makes choices. First, he gets to choose a snack, either Cheerios or crackers. He picks Cheerios. Then he’s shown a puppet, an orange cat, with a bowl of Cheerios, and another puppet, a gray cat, with a bowl of crackers. He gets to choose which puppet he likes best and he likes the orange cat, his Cheerios buddy.
Next Wynn tests Gregory to find out if he wants to see the gray cat, the one with a different snack preference, treated well or badly, and he wants that cat to be treated badly. Wynn finds this response in a significant percentage of the babies. They want difference to be punished.
The babies in Wynn’s experiments demonstrate our groupist morality even before they can speak or understand simple sentences, and thus before they’ve had any moral lessons explained to them by their parents. Right there in those baby responses is the beginning of the slippery slope into discrimination, injustice, and oppression. It’s not a simple slope, of course. The moral development of children is complex. But other researchers, doing other experiments with infants and toddlers, have come to the same fundamental conclusions as Wynn and Bloom.
Taken together, all of these experiments show us babies dealing with the core human dilemma of moral decision-making, which I find upsetting, because it doesn’t seem fair to have to deal with that challenge so early in life.
And yet it seems necessary. We cannot live successfully in groups if we’re not moral beings, and in the past it’s been good for our survival and for our success to have this groupist dimension of our human character born into us.
Noam Chomsky figured out that we’re born with an innate capacity for the core grammar and syntax of human language. Which particular language we learn to speak depends on the language our parents speak, but the capacity for language itself comes with our DNA.
Since we’re profoundly moral beings, why wouldn’t we be born with a capacity for responding to other people in a moral way? The specific mores we learn depend on our particular family and community, but at birth we inherit an underlying moral grammar, a groupist, us-versus-them grammar.
If we wanted to argue that babies are born absolutely innocent of human evil, then we’d need to find some way to explain how evil could have gotten into our societies in the first place. How could innocent children turn into evil adults? How could evil have become so pervasive if there weren’t some innate advantage driving it?
Letting go of the idea of the innocence of babies is not easy, first, because the idea itself is comforting, and second, because innocence holds out a promise of salvation. If babies are innocent, and if we could keep them that way as they grow up, or if we adults could find a way to get ourselves back into that idyllic early state, if we could recapture it and reincarnate it, then maybe we’d be able to save ourselves from destruction.
But children are not born innocent. Human evil is in each of them—in each of us—from day one. And that being the case, what do we tell our children about evil? It’s hard enough for most parents to figure out how to talk with their kids about sex and explain where babies come from. It’s a challenge to figure out how much to say, and how to say it, and at what age to say it. No wonder so many parents don’t have that conversation at all.
Much harder, though, is telling your child where evil comes from. If you don’t want to teach your child that she’s born a sinner, if you don’t want to teach her that she’s personally the source of the evil in her, and that apart from calling on a deity to redeem her, she’s helpless to do anything about it, then what?
Then you have to teach her about the human operating system and how hard it is on us. But how can you teach a child about something so dark and depressing? The religious explanation of evil looks benign by comparison.
There’s no easy answer to this dilemma. All I can say is if you choose to talk with a child about the moral problems that come with our operating system, taking her age and maturity into account, then I’d urge you to teach her immediately, without fail, as a matter of self-defense, about the twist of grace. Because that’s what gives us our moral ability to oppose evolution’s evil. And it gives us a path to self-love in the midst of depressing truths about humankind.
Imagine you have a fifteen-year-old daughter who’s just come home from school in tears, and so you initiate a conversation with her.
“What’s wrong?”
“I hate myself. I was mean to Sandy today. I told her she was a fat pig, then she told me she hated me forever. I knew it was an evil thing to say. I knew that’s what would hurt her the most. Now I’ve lost my best friend. How can I do something so bad when I want to be good?”
“It sounds to me like you’re really hurting because of what you said to Sandy.”
“It was a terrible thing I did to her.”
“And you’re hurting really bad right now?”
“Yes, I am.”
“And what does that say about you?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you saw someone hurting like you’re hurting right now what would you think about her?”
“That she hated being mean.”
“Yes.”
“I hate being mean.”
“I can see that. I can feel it. You’re really hurting because you were mean today.”
“But I feel terrible and I should.”
“What are you saying to yourself right now?”
“That I don’t deserve to have a best friend.”
“Who do you want for friends? People who like being mean or people who hate being mean?”
“People who hate being mean.”
“Like you do.”
“I guess.”
“Do you know anyone who’s never been mean?”
“There are kids who I’ve never seen be mean.”
“Do you think they have actually never been mean?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve seen really nice kids do mean things when they’re exasperated.”
“Were you exasperated today?”
“Yes, because Sandy and I were supposed to have lunch together. We talked about it this morning, and then when lunchtime came she was sitting with a bunch of popular girls and there wasn’t room for me at their table. She didn’t save me a seat.”
“So you were…what?”
“Hurt.”
“And then you did what?”
“Hurt her.”
“Would you say that’s a pretty common thing for kids to do?”
“I’ve seen other kids do that.”
“What do you think when you see it happen?”
“I want to stay away from them while they’re in a bad mood.”
“Are you thinking there’s no way you could ever be friends with them again?”
“No, sometimes kids say hurtful things and later they wish they hadn’t. Are we talking about me now? Like I still deserve to have friends?”
“That’s what I think, what do you think?”
“I can’t say what I did is okay, not when it feels so not okay.”
“Tell me what it means to be a kid.”
“There are way too many things we don’t know.”
“And…”
“Some days it’s really hard being a kid because you’ve got adults on your case, and they’re correcting you, and saying no about a million times. I wish I could have been born all grown-up.”
“I hear you. That’s one of the things about us humans. We’re born so unready for this world.”
“Not fair.”
“It’s not. But that’s the way it is. It’s not our fault. We didn’t choose for it to be like this. We didn’t make ourselves, evolution made us, and I really, really wish it had made our lives easier for us. We have to learn so much in order to grow up and often we have to learn by making mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes are painful.”
“Really painful.”
“Oh, yes.”
“But I don’t like myself anymore.”
“What about the part of you that’s hurting so bad?”
“If I can think about just that one part, she’s okay.”
“What makes her okay?”
“Because of her spirit.”
“Which means?”
“You know, her good heart.”
“Because…”
“Because she really wants to be a good person and treat people with respect. And she wants to love them.”
“Even when…”
“Even when they disappoint you.”
“We’re human, and that means we’re set up to hurt each other. But there’s a decision I made long ago that helps me do better. No one gave me permission to make it. I just made it. I decided to identify with the part of me that I call deepest in my heart. That’s the part of me that wants to love people, including myself.”
“The good part.”
“Yes, but I don’t like to use that word ‘good.’ I’d rather say we’ve got a human part that’s hard on us and a personal part that wants us to fight for ourselves.”
“You just make that up?”
“That’s what I do. You don’t have to. But I wonder if you aren’t already doing that.”
“Like in how much I’m hurting?”
“Yes.”
“And that it means I want to grow to a better place?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
“It’s like you to get to say your own yeses and noes. Adults are telling you stuff all the time, but this is something you get to decide for yourself. You get to say no to the part of being human you want to grow out of and yes to the part of yourself you want to grow into.”
“Okay. I like that.”
“So what might you say to Sandy when you see her in the morning?”
“I’d say, let me see…I’d say, ‘I’m so sorry I was mean to you yesterday. I hate what I said to you. You didn’t deserve it. And I want you to be my friend. You matter to me. You really do.’”
“What are you noticing?”
“That popped out on its own.”
“Does that mean the loving part of you knows what it wants?”
“I hope so.”
“And maybe it’s kind of gutsy?”
“I suppose. But I don’t know if I can say all that.”
“Is there a part of you that would like to?”
“Yes, there is.”
“And…”
“I want that part to win.”
“You get to choose to identify with that part. You get to say ‘that’s the me who I want to be.’ And if you did that, what would you want to tell Sandy about that part?”
“I guess I’d tell her, ‘I’ve decided I don’t want to be the kind of person who says mean things when I’m upset. I’m really serious about that. And I’m working on it. That’s a piece of growing up I really want to do. And you deserve to know this because you deserve more than an apology, because I hurt you so bad. You deserve to know that I’m working on myself.’ ”
“And now what are you noticing?”
“That feels better. Because that’s me being strong instead of being a nothing. Like I’m a somebody who’s got a calling.”
“So, question. If someone were apologizing to you for something mean they said, would you want them to wreck themselves or give you their best self?”
“Jeez, don’t wreck yourself. Too much damage already. Actually, I think I’d trust the apology more if it came from her best self. When someone tears herself down, doesn’t she start to feel resentment?”
“I would. I did. I used to shred myself when I did an apology as though it were a gift to give someone the bloody pulp of myself.”
“Gross.”
“Double gross.”
“Triple gross.”
“So do you get to keep on loving yourself even when you’ve said something really mean but now you’re doing an apology?”
“I guess. Yes, I guess I get to decide to do that, so I will.”
“So now what are you thinking you want to do about Sandy?”
“I’m going to call her tonight. I’m too upset to wait till morning. No, I’m going to call her right now.”
“And if she’s so mad she won’t talk to you?”
“I’ll send her a text and say what I need to say and show her the part of me that I’ve decided is who I want to be. What more can I do?”
“That seems like a lot right there. If you give her the most loving part of yourself, if you show her how you’re fighting to do better, then how could anyone ask for more? Well, I guess they could ask, but there’s really nothing better to give them, is there?”
“I can’t think of anything. Okay. Here goes. Wish me luck.”
“Always.”
For two thousand years, theologians have wrestled with the “Problem of Evil.” It’s the toughest challenge there is for people of faith. It starts with an indisputable fact. Evil exists. Our world is filled with it and it causes immense suffering. But if God is compassionate and if he’s all-powerful, how can that be? If he cares about us and has the power to stop evil, then it would be stopped. It’s just that simple.
This leaves us with two possibilities. If God is compassionate but evil continues, he’s not all-powerful. So while he might be a very nice guy, we can’t look to him for help.
But if God is all-powerful and evil continues, that means he doesn’t care. And why would we ever give our hearts and our loyalty to someone who doesn’t care about us?
There’s good news for theologians, though. We can let God off the hook because he’s not the source of evil. Evolution is. And that means we need to replace the Problem of Evil with the Dilemma of Evil. And the dilemma is this: how very good our evil has been to us.
Our tribal nature has been the source of our success as a species. And the exact same thing, our tribal nature, has been the source of our worst evil. We are most indebted to what’s most hateful about us.
As we’ve progressed as a species, our ability to do evil has also progressed. Not satisfied with hurting each other one by one, we’ve created ways to systematically exploit billions of people at the same time. We’ve invented industrial mass murder. We’ve built nuclear devices. And what’s next? We’re impatient. We never rest. We keep improving our ability to cause greater destruction with greater ease. And this is humanevilution.
Worse than dying is looking into the mirror and not liking what we see. This includes looking into our species mirror. What’s that? History is our mirror. And current events. Go to YouTube, type in search terms like poverty, racism, world hunger, weaponry, war, genocide, and human extinction—and there you have it, a reflection of us. Of course you could type in kindness and compassion. But all that evil is still right there in the mirror, and it seems to me, overwhelms the good stuff. How many acts of kindness would it take to offset a century of routine, systematic, mass oppression in just one country? Or to offset a single eruption of genocide.
We want to take pride in our species. We want to believe that we’re evolution’s best achievement. But there in the mirror, if we look closely, is a level of species shame that can easily eclipse our species pride. Sometimes I think our shame runs so deep that extinction might be easier for us to accept than the kind of rigorous self-examination it would take for us to get ourselves on a better path.
One evening before turning in, I went online to watch an ordinary newscast—a bit of war here, a bit of war there, three murders, a Congressional scandal—nothing unusual, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Suddenly a light flashed in my imagination, then went out and left a darkling imp, a diminutive sorcerer, standing at my feet staring up at me. He knocked his wand twice against my right hand and chanted, “Raise it high, let it float, bring it down as sharp as sharp, all gone, all gone.” Riddling words, but I understood what he meant. He had granted me a special power. If I raised my hand high above my head then slashed it down like the checkered flag at the finish of a race, I could make all humans disappear in the instant. I thought of the Christian Rapture, God’s chosen ones leaving us nonbelievers behind as they stream up into heaven, gleeful that not only have they been saved but that the rest of us have been damned, and maybe they like the damning part better than the saving part, but that’s not what this was.
This was Deliverance. We’d all go together, no one abandoned. And it would be accomplished with hushed decorum, no sounding trumpets, no angel choirs, no warning, no time for distress, just a sucking sound then a quiet pop, and off we’d go, all of us absorbed back into the stuff of the universe from which we came.
In the moment when the imp made me his offer, I was feeling such disgust at the night’s news that I thought, “Yes, let’s be gone, this species, my species, so helplessly evil.” I looked for my hand and there it was, already down at the bottom of its wave, sharp as sharp. I had done that terrible thing, I had disappeared us, and would have been horrified, except that if a final bloody apocalypse is ahead for us then I would want to spare us, every one of us, and yes, oh yes, especially the children. And if we were delivered, all of us together and all at once, then not one more day of evil would be added to the burden of our collective human soul.
But Deliverance is only a fantasy and, besides, it would be bailing out when what we need to do is stand and fight.
If we want to take action to make things better in this human world of ours even as we continue on into our final chapter, then we need to learn a special kind of two-step.
First, we look at the truth of who we are, as evil as we are. Except immediately I have to interrupt and qualify that. First, we look at some of the truth of who we are, because all of it is too much. No one can handle that.
But once we’ve got our dose of truth, then step two, we need to match it with moral fight. And best is doing both steps at the same time. Embrace a measured portion of truth while vigorously nurturing our fight. Then embrace even more truth while nurturing even more fight.
It matters that we confront our fearful evolutionary inheritance directly, because if we don’t, we won’t get mad enough about it to fight it with everything we’ve got.
Imagine it’s June, and you have a son who’s just home from his first year in college, and you’re worried about him.
“You seem so sad since you got home. Is something wrong, or am I misreading you?”
“No, you’re right. I’m going through some stuff.”
“I’d like to hear about it if you’re willing to tell me.”
“It’s kind of depressing.”
“Then I definitely want to hear about it.”
“I’m changing my major. Though I don’t know to what.”
“Okay, well, that’s big news. What happened? You’ve been so committed to history.”
“College history is not like high school history.”
“How do you mean?”
“Remember when I got to tenth grade and took my first American history class with Mr. Daniels?”
“Yes, it was like you found yourself. I was so happy for you. You started liking school so much I didn’t have to nag you to get out of bed in the morning.”
“I fell in love with history because…I don’t know the reason. It just grabbed me.”
“I’ve always thought it was because you like to ask why. Kids do that a lot, but you did it triple. And you didn’t ask typical things like why is the sky blue or the grass green. Your whys were always about people: Why is Johnny a bully but Jimmy’s a nice guy?”
“Really? I guess that makes sense. I think being an historian is like being a detective. I like figuring out why people in groups do the good things they do and why they do the bad things they do. And why some leaders succeed and others fail. And why the decisions nations make are sometimes so smart and sometimes so stupid.”
“It sounds like in and of yourself you haven’t changed.”
“No, it’s history that’s changed. In high school, history was happier. We studied how we won our war for independence, how we won World War II, and how we became a superpower. We read about larger-than-life characters like Teddy Roosevelt and explorers like Lewis and Clark. And then there was something else.”
“Which was?”
“I never once had to think about the fact that I’m a white guy in the midst of a society that privileges white guys while it hurts so many other people. Isn’t that kind of shocking? Not once.”
“But maybe not surprising.”
“No, not surprising at all. Not given what I know now.”
“So college history is different?”
“It couldn’t be more different.”
“Tell me.”
“You know what source materials are?”
“The reports of witnesses to the events.”
“Yes, the participants’ stories in their own words, plus newspaper accounts and other documents from the time. Well, in high school we talked about the genocide of native peoples, and I thought I understood, but we were like water striders only skimming along the surface. During the first semester this past year, in my class on the ‘History of Indigenous People in America,’ we were assigned source material, lots and lots of it. It was an immersion. And it was dark. We read the histories of different tribes. We got to know how they lived and in some cases read their stories in their own words. And just as we began to feel for them we had to read how they were slaughtered, and because I had begun to care about those people, I kind of took it personally.
“And then we read the words of the pioneers and soldiers, exuberant, happy murderers. They were our ancestors. They made America what it became. They’re our history. So how can I not take personally what they did? How is their shame not also my shame?
“I see. Really hard questions.”
“Then second semester, when I took ‘The History of Black People in America from Slavery to the Present,’ again there was lots of source material, and again immersion. And it was really painful. But, look, all this stuff is depressing. You don’t need me dumping my distress on you.”
“No, I want to understand what you’re going through. Please tell me.”
“Every night for two weeks I went to the library and read slave narratives. At first I was struck by the fact that slavery was one long grind of exhausting work. There was something almost banal about the relentless boredom of it. Until you look just a little bit deeper. I read an interview with a former slave who said her master was much kinder than the owner on the neighboring plantation. So I’m thinking, well, that’s something I guess. But then she added that all it took was ten minutes under the lash and none of his ‘kindness’ mattered anymore. Nothing mattered except that somebody owned you and could beat you bloody whenever he wanted to.
“Ownership meant a master could sell off a slave at any time for any reason—as a punishment or to pay a gambling debt or just on a whim. Slave families lived in constant fear of being broken up. Nearly half of all slaves were separated from spouse or parents or children. Forever. Imagine if someone could sell me off. Maybe I’d only be at a plantation three miles away, but it might as well be three thousand miles because you’d never see me ever again in your lifetime.”
“I can’t imagine. I’d be out of my mind with rage.”
“And I wondered, why don’t we call that terrorism?”
“I guess because we don’t want to think of our forebears as people who did incredibly evil things.”
“My country, which I want to love, had a terrible birth. It was born in genocide and slavery. Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves himself, at least had the grace to be shaken by slavery, and to worry about divine retribution. He said, ‘Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever….’
“We want to believe we’re successful because of our exceptional smarts and prowess and work ethic. But we started off with free land, which was stolen, and free labor, which was forced, and if you can’t make a success out of your country when you’ve got free land and free labor you’re a bunch of idiots.”
“What about after the slavery years, did the class get easier?”
“No. We had to read Slavery by Another Name, about the whole long period following the Civil War, and, god, it was terrible. Not the book but the information. The South did not give up on forced labor just because slavery was outlawed, it pivoted and used a different strategy. If a coal mine needed workers, they’d send an order over to the county sheriff, who’d then go out and arrest Black men for vagrancy or talking too loud or other trumped-up charges. He’d put them in jail, hit them with fines they couldn’t pay, and consign them out to the mining company to pay off their ‘debt.’ The company would give the sheriff a commission for his trouble, which kept the county government funded while the companies got dirt-cheap labor in return.”
“Was that at least better than slavery?”
“Yes and no. It was an improvement because instead of four million people enslaved, we’re only talking about hundreds of thousands of men. Only. But at the same time it was worse than slavery because when you owned a slave he was an asset. You could turn him into money whenever you wanted to. And you didn’t want to have to buy new slaves all the time, which would be way too expensive, so you’d feed your slaves at least the minimum. You had a compelling reason to keep them alive and healthy enough to work.
“But a forced laborer was expendable. You could get a replacement just by sending a note to the sheriff. If a man died you didn’t lose anything. So the conditions were deadly. The men worked in the mine for long hours, then at night walked through a tunnel to locked barracks with no windows. For months at a time they didn’t see the sun or breathe fresh air. They were given no water so they had to drink water from the floor of the mine, with toxics that had seeped into it, water that they walked through and worked in.”
“I’m having a very hard time listening to this.”
“We can stop.”
“No, I’m sticking with you. But here’s something I’m thinking right now. People say they don’t like history because it’s boring. But maybe people shy away from history because it’s utterly painful.”
“Yes, yes, yes, I think that’s true.”
“Pick up where you left off.”
“So after the Civil War, if you were a Black male, you could be taken at any time. And in some of the mines as many as thirty percent of the men brought there died there. This means that fathers, sons, and brothers could be taken from their families without warning never to return home. And again, why don’t we call that terrorism?”
“Wasn’t this when lynching was happening, too?”
“Yes, that happened during the period called Jim Crow, which is a ridiculously lightweight name for such a terrible time. There were four thousand lynchings. I read an article where a guy said, ‘Well, that’s not really many people lost when you consider it was over some number of decades.’ But that’s exactly how terror works. You leverage specific incidents of violence to keep an entire community living in constant, desperate fear. And the lynchings were only the tip of the iceberg. A white person could beat, stab, or shoot Black people at will because there were no consequences. Add it all up and I have to ask, that whole period from the end of the Civil War up to the Civil Rights movement, shouldn’t we call it our Century of Terrorism?”
“That’s a terrible thing to say, but I understand why you’re saying it.”
“And I’ve never said that to anyone but you. I’m scared if I said it in class, even if I asked it as a question, I’d get attacked.”
“I understand.”
“But that’s what I really feel about what I’ve learned, that we’ve been a terrorist country. And that makes loving my country really hard.”
“What about the present?”
“Our professor had Stephanie, a grad student, come in to do a presentation on mass incarceration. It was a difficult hour. She said we have five percent of the world’s population but twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. With 2.2 million people locked up, we’re the most incarcerated society in the history of the world.”
“The most ever?!”
“Yes.”
“How did this happen?”
“Not by accident. If something of that magnitude was just by accident wouldn’t we have fixed it by now? Wouldn’t we have declared a national emergency and made a major national effort to fix it, whatever it took?”
“You would expect a national uproar. Which there isn’t.”
“Stephanie showed us the money trail. Private prison companies are raking in billions, then spending millions lobbying for more severe sentencing guidelines and longer terms. They love recidivism. They want more and more people locked up. And it made me wonder, what’s their ultimate goal? How many of their fellow citizens do they want to put into their prisons? Ten percent? Twenty percent? Do they have a limit?
“And then there are corporations, major brands, companies with names you would know, that use prison labor. They might pay only twenty-eight dollars a month for full days of work, so they’re happy to keep prisons going strong.”
“Wait, you mean twenty-eight dollars a day.”
“No, a month. While making a $50,000 profit off a year of that prisoner’s labor. You could call that a really good deal for the corporations, or you could call it exploitation and injustice.”
“Why don’t I know about this?”
“The corporations don’t want the public to know because it might tarnish their brands, and the public is not particularly interested in knowing anyway.”
“I see.”
“Then Stephanie showed us how associations of correction guards are major lobbying forces in their state capitols and push to get more prisons built. She showed us how much money county governments make from the fines and fees they charge the people they arrest. Which gives them incentive to increase arrests. Even to make sketchy arrests. Of course they couldn’t get away with this strategy if they ran it on well-to-do people, so they run it on low-income people.
“There’s a lot I still don’t know about this issue, but here’s what I understand so far. We have two tracks of incarceration. There are dangerous people who commit serious crimes who we need to lock up.
“But then there’s this whole other bigger track. Our country uses incarceration against poor people to keep them trapped in poverty and to keep their communities broken so they don’t gain serious political power.
“Stephanie showed us the clever schemes there are for sweeping people into the system, including in too many cases, people who haven’t actually committed a crime, but agree to plead guilty to a minor offense to get out of jail on bail so they can keep their jobs or get home to take care of their kids. But now they have a record. Or people who have committed nonviolent, nonserious offenses like possessing pot, who are being punished in ways that are so much more severe than the crime, which in more and more states isn’t even a crime anymore.
“And what I find most disturbing is that we have the power to change this system. Other developed countries don’t do what we do. But our leaders don’t have the political will. They don’t even seem to have the desire to find the will. And the rest of us are not putting the necessary pressure on them to make the change we need.
“Pundits and politicians are increasingly calling the War on Drugs a failure, because the epidemic of drug abuse has not been resolved. But Stephanie said this war has been a grand success because it’s been deeply disruptive and damaging to low-income communities, and, in particular, the Black community.
“Most people agree that slaves didn’t deserve to be enslaved and forced laborers didn’t deserve their fate, but criminals are by definition seen as bad people, so they deserve whatever they get. That means incarceration will be a harder thing to stop because society can’t see incarcerated people as having any moral high ground. But maybe if we knew their life stories and how our system of poverty plus incarceration sets them up to fail, we might think differently.
“If slavery was Oppression 1.0 and terror was Oppression 2.0, then mass incarceration is Oppression 3.0. And if it ever gets stopped, will it get transformed into something else? And what would be next? What would Oppression 4.0 be? And if my country is so diabolical in how it treats ‘the least of these’ how am I supposed to love it? Listen, I’m sorry to load you up with all this. I feel like I’m not fit to be around people these days.”
“Please don’t say that. What I’m hearing is that you’re hurting.”
“When I’m not depressed, I guess I am.”
“You know, I admire you.”
“For what? I feel wrecked.”
“You’re hurting but you’re still keeping your heart open.”
“But I feel overwhelmed and I don’t know what to do. If I had been alive during the time of slavery I would wish that I had been an abolitionist. But what do I do now?”
“I’m thinking that maybe what you’re struggling with is not a career decision but a moral decision. Maybe before you can make any specific plans about your life, you need to figure out what your moral mission is.”
“I just feel beaten.”
“You know what? I don’t see that. What I’m hearing loud and clear inside your distress is your passion. I know you’re feeling crushed, but I’m also hearing serious anger.”
“There’s a whirlwind of feelings going on inside me. This is such a beautiful country and we’ve got so much wealth and we’ve got people with such talents, and we’re making such a mess of it, an excruciating mess, and I can’t stand it. And on top of that I feel betrayed by history, which was supposed to be my future. I’m pissed at it for turning against me.”
“Do you know the phrase ‘dark night of the soul’?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe that’s what you’re going through.”
“Maybe. But what do I do?”
“How about if we declare an emergency?”
“What does that mean?”
“You’re hurting, really hurting, so let’s figure out what you need to do in order to take care of yourself. And put that first before anything else.”
“Like how?”
“Like if you didn’t teach history, what would you do instead?”
“I have no idea. Lead a boring, stupid life.”
“We can’t let that happen.”
“I just feel so sad. I’ve never felt this sad before.”
“Tell me about the other students in your history classes.”
“There’s Ted. I call him the righteous guy. He talked the most. He’s really smart, so I found myself agreeing with a lot of what he said, but it’s how he said it that I didn’t like. He put a judgmental spin on everything. Like we were a bunch of dummies and needed him to tell us what to think.”
“What did his righteousness do for him?”
“Maybe it buffered him so he didn’t have to get up close and personal with the course material. So he didn’t have to hurt like I’m hurting.”
“Righteousness can work that way.”
“And then there was Kevin, who I call the shame guy. I caught up with him one night at the student union and asked him a bunch of nosy questions. Turns out he felt shamed by the class. He was stewing in his misery. And he was really angry at Ted and the professor ‘for making me feel bad about myself.’ He was taking it all personally, but in a way that didn’t do him or anybody else any good.
“And then there was Evan, who I call the distance guy. He was even-keeled all the time. I asked him how he did it and he said, ‘What’s to be upset about? It’s just events. And mostly in the past. It has nothing to do with me so I don’t take any of it personally.’ He got the best grades. He didn’t let anything stand between him and his A-plus.
“Then there’s me, the drop-out guy. I’m taking it all so personally and so painfully that I just want to run.”
“What does ‘taking it personally’ mean?”
“I’m an American, so American history is my history. And the American present is my present. I feel burdened by what my country has done in the past and responsible for what it’s doing now.”
“That’s an awful lot for one person to carry.”
“I guess.”
“If you were a history teacher, would you want your students to carry history like you’re carrying it now?”
“No, not at all.”
“In your reading did you come across people in our history who opposed evil?”
“Oh, yes, all along the way. Sometimes only a few. Sometimes lots. One hundred thousand slaves ran away during the Revolutionary War. There were slave revolts. There was Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. In the final years before the Civil War there were thousands of people in antislavery societies. And during the Civil Rights movement, there were all those students who did brave things. There are people working now to stop mass incarceration. They’ve been doing it for years, and now finally they’re getting just a bit of public interest.”
“So does that count as American history, too?”
“I guess it would have to.”
“And what do you feel about those fighters?”
“I see what you’re getting at. Would I like to be part of their lineage? And yes, I would. Does that sound too grand?”
“Not to me. How about to you?”
“It’s what I want.”
“So then you get to go for it. But what does that mean to you?”
“I get to identify with the fighters of history instead of the evil of history. I get to follow in their footsteps and find work I can do to push things forward in a better direction.”
“I like that word ‘identify.’ In psychology we have something we call dis-identification. You see your dark side, you don’t deny it, you really see it, the evil in you by virtue of being born human, but then at the same time you find a place to stand outside it. You develop an oppositional identity.”
“So what do you identify with?”
“With the fight I find in my heart.”
“That’s where the moral part of it comes in?”
“Yes, and taking a moral stand is the only way I know to deal with the evil in this world without doing myself harm. It’s like we’re born tribal. That’s what evolution has done to us. But still we can make the personal moral decision to be anti-tribal.”
“Like being born into a racist society but then making a commitment to do your best to live as an antiracist.”
“Exactly. And you know what? I’m glad to see you so distressed.”
“Glad?!”
“Yes. Here’s one sure thing I’ve learned over the course of my convoluted years of often confused activism. The more deeply you understand the magnitude of the oppression in your society, the more deeply you can hate it, and the more deeply you hate it, the more your fight ignites.”
“So if I were to ask the fight in my heart about my future…”
“…great question…”
“…I would commit to teaching history, because I do love it, though I guess now it’s a love/hate relationship, but still, it’s my thing. History matters to me, first, because if we don’t know our history, how are we going to understand the systemic evil that’s going on now? Second, because we’re living in scary times. We could lose our democracy, as imperfect as it is, and any hope to improve it in the future, if we don’t change course. Third, because just on a personal level, I want to study how humans make decisions in big groups. And I would like to see if we could figure a way for a mass society like ours to move away from exploitation and toward nurturance. Maybe that’s an impossible hope but I want to pursue it.”
“How would your teaching be different from the way your professors teach?”
“I like my professors a lot, but they abandoned us this year. They left us entirely on our own to work out our relationship with the real world they were teaching us about. When I become a professor, I’ll put the students first, not the information. I’ll talk with them in class about how to take care of themselves and how to find their fight. I’ll work with them one-on-one during my office hours. I don’t want any of them to go down the dead-end street of righteousness or shame. I don’t want any of them to drop out, not if they love history.”
“And your mission is—?”
“I want to help young people come of age politically and morally. Which is what I guess I’m going through myself right now. Even though I’m still a student, being at college and away from home makes me feel like I’ve officially become an adult, with adult responsibilities not only for my own life but for the world I live in.”
“How will you know what the right moral decisions are? Sometimes I hear so many competing opinions I don’t know what to think.”
“Gina, one of our teaching assistants, in every session we have with her, talks about ‘lived experience.’ As in, hold off on ideology and theory, because first you have to know the daily, lived reality of a person’s life before you dare to make any decisions that will affect them. Same with whole communities. Before anything else, you have to know who they are and what they need, what will help them and what will hurt them. And get that information directly from them.”
“How will you do that?”
“I don’t know. I need to have a long talk with Gina about how she does it.”
“You know, if you oppose the status quo, if you support people who are leading radical change, and you go deep with how you teach history, you’re going to get called unpatriotic, and worse.”
“I know. You can see that in the lives of protestors throughout history. People pushing for social progress didn’t have it easy.”
“So how about if we talk about taking care of yourself on that score?”
“Like?”
“Like gathering support for yourself. I’ll start. Here’s an offer. How about if you give me the titles of the three most disturbing books you read this year and I’ll get a copy of each and read them.”
“That’s an awful lot of reading.”
“I’m up for it. I want to be able to better understand what you’re going through. And it will give us a common language and set of facts. Also, how about if we schedule regular check-ins so you can tell me how you’re doing and we can do some brainstorming together, if you like. We can talk anytime, of course, but how about if we lock a minimum of two hours per week into our calendars for the rest of the summer?”
“Yes, please, that would help a lot.”
“How else can you get support?”
“Well, there’s a conference for history teachers in August. If I’m going to keep on my history path, I should go to that.”
“And what would be your mission there?”
“To network with as many people as I can and to be pushy and ask them how they challenge the status quo in their teaching.”
“What if most of them give you a blank stare or don’t get what you’re talking about?”
“That doesn’t matter as long as I can find even two or three who maybe could be role models or mentors or kindred spirits.”
“Is anyone you know attending? Who did you connect best with from your classes?”
“Walter, definitely. He and I had four really long, really good talks in the last three months. He’s a kindred spirit. But he works two jobs to stay in school, so I don’t get to spend much time with him.”
“What if you call him to see if he’s going to the conference?”
“It’s expensive.”
“If he can’t afford it, tell him you have two ‘parent scholarships,’ and I’ll cover the cost for both of you. I would love to see you getting serious about having allies.”
“I’ll definitely call him, and thank you. I think you’d really like him.”
“What else do you want to do?”
“I’ll keep a journal to track all the changes I’m going through. I’ll catch all the ups and downs, all the nuances, because that’s how I’ll develop the understanding and the language I’ll need to help students of my own someday. And I’m going to do a minor in communication psychology, so I can get through to people with my ideas. Next year I’ll start a mutual support group for history students who are struggling with what I’m struggling with. And when I’m ready I’ll create a blog about how I want to change the teaching of history so I can make a place for myself in the community of thought leaders.”
“Wow. And what else are you thinking about?”
“I’m an introvert. It’s a match for me to be a professor so I can work with students on a deeper, more personal level rather than doing mass organizing. But is that enough? That seems so slow and long-term, and there are so many millions of people suffering right now, and the need for change is urgent.”
“So then…”
“I could join the big activist organization on campus but keep my focus on this deeper work of transformation. Which actually has an urgency of its own, doesn’t it?”
“I think so. If we want sustainable change, it seems like it has to go deep.”
“Thank you for pushing on me. I don’t feel lost now. I don’t feel found yet, but I have my starting place. Thanks for not backing off from my dark mood.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I look into the future and I see so much work ahead of me and so many unknowns.”
“And?”
“It kind of takes my breath away.”
“Because…”
“This path of moral ambition looks like it’s going to be hard.”
“Hard?”
“No, you know what’s hard? Stuck is hard. Trapped in despair is hard.”
“I know what you mean. Here’s how I think of it. Despair is harder but fight is more challenging. Despair makes your life hard because it sucks out your soul, so your days are deadening. Fight asks so much of you, but it’s nurturing so it’s enlivening.”
“Then I choose fight.”
“In my experience, fight is generous. It gives back more than what it asks.”
“Do you think that could be true for me, too?”
“I think you’re about to find out.”
“Yes, I am.”
Babies are not innocent. How could they be? They’ve got all twenty-three pairs of human chromosomes inside them. And the world those chromosomes have created can overwhelm us with its brutality and suffering. It can make us feel helpless. Like babies. Except babies are born with the twist of grace in them, too.
This means as we grow up, as we gather life experience, as we deepen our empathy for people who are hurting, especially people who are not part of our tribe, we can take the humble moral grace we find in our hearts and set it against the monstrous human evil in the world. An unfair fight, a very unfair fight, but very much a fight.
