Human Goodness

Preface

vii Preface It is said that in a story the flawed characters—even the villains— have a certain appeal, whereas the good ones, despite efforts on the part of the author, are boring or inconsequential.1 Newspaper publishers and editors must think the same, for, inevitably, crimes appear on the front page, whereas good deeds appear, if at all, tucked away in a back section devoted to social gossip. Since publishers want their papers to sell and since they have a pretty good idea of what their readers want, presumably readers in general also favor stories of gore to stories of kindness and valor. Either a pessimistic or an optimistic interpretation can be given to this attitude. The pessimistic interpretation sees people as cynically wanting their own sour experiences in life, their own bad deeds, confirmed in the world “out there.” So I have a lousy job, so I occasionally abuse my spouse, slander my office mate, and cheat on my income tax, but worse things—far worse things—are done by other people. The optimistic interpretation takes the overall decency of life for granted. As the weeks and months go by my mail is delivered, the plumber comes when called, children viii squirt water playfully at one another, and the neighbors volunteer to feed my cat when I’m away. Good, in other words, is the norm, and we are distressed, shocked, by departures from it. How do I see my fellow human beings? It occurs to me that I have never addressed this question head-on, even though I have been a student of society and culture for half a century. Nor have I confronted the question of whether I find the gore on the front page more worthy of attention than the small acts of heroism in ordinary lives that are sometimes also reported. Accounts of extreme evil do hold me in thrall: I am morbidly drawn, like many others, to the horrors of the Holocaust. But ordinary human flaws, those that derive from our ingrained egoism, our pathetic need for wealth and fame and for power to lord over others, are, for me, simply boring. This is one reason why I cannot be a sociologist . I have no wish to spend a lifetime trying to describe, numerate , and analyze these all too familiar weaknesses and vanities. When I read fiction and find that it deals with the peccadilloes of society, I stop turning the page. The same happens in real life. I have no patience for gossip, my objection being more aesthetic than moral. All the talk about who is up and who is down is as banal and undignified as nose picking. But good people and good action, whether encountered in life or reaching me indirectly through reports, make me sit up. This, I suppose, means that I am basically a pessimist, someone who takes human veniality and Preface ix nastiness for granted and so is easily surprised not only by heroic virtue but by just good behavior, even politeness. “Good” rather than “bad” in human beings is, to me, exciting, and exciting, in part, because of its range of manifestation. That idea, again, is contrary to the common wisdom that “good” is monotonously alike, whereas “bad” or evil is endlessly colorful and various. How many people share my view rather than, say, Tolstoy’s, who famously asseverated in the opening paragraph of Anna Karenina, “All happy [read “good”] families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”? I would like to know. One way to find out is to offer vignettes of goodness that I happen to have come across and that have lifted my spirit—if only for a moment—and see whether they have a similar effect on you. These vignettes are grouped under some sixteen headings, each of which addresses or exhibits one type of goodness. The variety of ways of being good or doing good is thus shown. In the nature of the case, most of these vignettes highlight a particular act or state of being, and we cannot know whether it stands alone in the life of an individual or whether there are other acts or states of being like it. “Vignettes” is followed by “Doing Good in the Midst of Evil.” This section differs from “Vignettes” in three ways. First, its location is southern France, where the people...