The Evil Of Being Right
Why we can’t see our right as wrong?
In 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick published his famous sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” The answer is — they have. The defining characteristic of our time seems to be fundamentalism — right, left, atheist, religious, racial, gender, stupid — all things are take no prisoners, be pure to your theory or “principles,” and reject any and all counter-evidence. There is no middle ground, no appropriate agnosticism about life, no tolerance for others, and only harsh and unjust tribal justice.
With this rant out of the way, I wish to consider why this is, how it hurts us all, and what we can do about it.The why is relatively easy to explain and very hard to dislodge. It can be categorized as human behavior, conditioning, and our specific history as Americans. We have difficulty extracting our own experience from the perspective that we are the center of the human experience.
As David Foster Wallace so succinctly pointed out in his commencement talk at Kenyon College in 2005; Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid, and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.[i]
We know our motivations, our complexities, our excuses, and we are ready to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. But we have to work to understand others. This is something that, if we have not trained ourselves, if we have not disciplined our minds empathy and understanding, we find to be hard work. By and large, the mind and emotions are lazy. They are quite happy to simply go with the flow, go with the judgments of society, and not do the work to consider alternatives. We default to the all-powerful “confirmation effect.”
Recently, an article described why people fail to see systemic discrimination against other groups and support political leaders who ultimately betray what they claim to believe. The author wrote; If you asked rural Americans how they felt about people of any particular minority group, most would pride themselves on having an unassuming, open-minded acceptance. And, for the most part, that is true on a personal level. But, to them, racism is a Klansman in a movie. It isn’t a contemporary power structure or an implicit bias that gets black teenagers killed. They don’t see that. They can, on the other hand, see themselves struggling. They just very earnestly do not get it. The minorities they do know are … pressured to fit in, to stay quiet. They’re not talking much about racism.[ii] This is a common human condition, not relegated to just “rural” Americans. We simply see the world through our own personal experiences.
We have been raised in a world surrounded by the idea of right and wrong in ways that are often cultural and tribal. They are ways of viewing right as an inside-the-tribe value and wrong as an outside-the-tribe value. It is a view that requires exclusion or judgment on those who are outside, and acceptance only of those who conform to our norms. It is also a way of viewing the world that accepts a certain degree of cruelty as good. It’s not merely acceptable, but actually good. We have been conditioned to view hell as somehow a manifestation of love. But there is no rational way that this can be true. Justice can, perhaps, be an equal punishment for all parties, but it is far better if it were an equality of mercy for all parties.
Our ancestors came to this country, the British North American colonies, not for religious freedom as we have been led to believe but to practice our own versions of religious intolerance (the exception perhaps being Pennsylvania and some other middle colonies). This obsession with being right, having it all figured out, and being pure in our rightness, continues in our social DNA to the present time. And now, in our post-truth will-to-power age, this has culminated in the radical tribalism and vicious hatred of the other that we are currently facing. And this doesn’t even begin to talk about the fundamental issues surrounding slavery and economic injustices foisted by the rich on the poor in the name of “progress” or ‘civilization.”
This does not mean that all people are the same in this regard. Some have deliberately tried to work on their critical thinking skills. It is a cop-out to say that it is inevitable and that we can do nothing about this.
So what shall we then say to all of this? We all stand in the mire; we are all lost and need help. A glimpse of hope comes from Dostoyevsky’s portrayal of the speech made by the character Marmeladov in Chapter Two of Part One of “Crime and Punishment.” It wraps up with the hopeful leveling of all:
“And He will judge and will forgive all, the good and the evil, the wise and the meek… And when He has done with all of them, then He will summon us. ‘You too come forth,’ He will say, ‘Come forth ye drunkards, come forth, ye weak ones, come forth, ye children of shame!’ And we shall all come forth without shame and stand before him. And He will say unto us, ‘Ye are swine, made in the Image of the Beast and with his mark; but come ye also!’ And the wise ones and those of understanding will say, ‘Oh Lord, why dost Thou receive these men?’ And He will say, ‘This is why I receive them, oh ye wise, this is why I receive them, oh ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.’ And He will hold out His hands to us, and we shall fall down before him… and we shall weep… and we shall understand all things! Then we shall understand all!… and all will understand, Katerina Ivanovna even… she will understand… Lord, Thy kingdom come!”[iii]
Dostoyevsky saw a better way. We can, too. Let your kingdom come!
[i] David Foster Wallace, This is Water, Kenyon College Commencement Address, 2005. https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
[ii] Larry Womack, The Independent, November 25, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-supporters-california-clinton-fake-news-vote-2020-a9214131.html?fbclid=IwAR0WS57yMDZ7M8Qu3vhGvaPf6LK_8bZoi-RPEKJGlmk2HW735C40LVfv_iE
[iii] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Part I, Chapter II
