We should remember that there are few pleasures greater than promoting your moral enthusiasms at other people’s expense.
― Theodore Dalrymple, Spoilt Rotten: the Toxic Cult of Sentimentality
English cultural critic, prison physician and psychiatrist, Anthony Malcolm Daniels, also known by the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, understands too well the slippery slope of moral enthusiasm. There’s often nothing more exhilerating than to ride the tide of moral enthusiasm. This is the stuff that cultural–and personal–dreams are made of. Righteous indignation blossoms into full-fledged moral enthusiasm, and the world lies at our feet. Sometimes trembling in anticipation or sometimes in fear, sometimes sleeping, blissfully unware of what’s to come, the world is our playground–or perhaps more aptly, our stomping ground. For when moral enthuiasm comes at other people’s expense, our speech and actions may leave a path of destruction in their wake.
Memes commemorating 2020 will undoubtedly continue into the new year. Most of us were all too eager to ring out the year-from-hell. We joked about the “new normal,” and yet, truthfully we weren’t laughing. Quarantined in our homes, our interactions with the outside world came largely through the internet and television. And what we saw there was anything but normal. Hospitals struggled with the influx of Covid patients, death rates climbed, dire predictions abounded, and authorities debated the best courses of action. And then as the world grappled with the horrors of a pandemic–the likes of which it hadn’t experienced for a century–we took to the airwaves. First in relative solidarity and then increasingly in conflict, we plastered social media with proclamations of what to do, how to think and live in this new age of pandemic.
On the heels of pandemic came nationwide racial, social, and political conflict, the intensity of which harkened back to the 1960s. Again, some of us took to the airwaves, first to comment and then increasingly to shame. Some lived through social media, eager to agree with those who espoused like ideas and equally eager to refute those who didn’t. Moral enthusiasm was the name of the game, and it was the only real game in town.
Clearly, moral enthusiasm isn’t, by nature, a bad thing. We depend upon those who think and act with moral enthusiasm which makes–and has made–our world a better place. We can’t imagine our lives without the thinkers and doers who are so excited by cell biology or artificial intelligence or genomics. Too often, we take for granted those whose moral enthusiasm has led to social, economic, environmental, medical, and political innovations that have changed our world. True, many will argue that these changes haven’t always been good or that their consequences have been dangerous. In the past year as the world’s scientists worked feverishly to develop safe Covid vaccines, many of us questioned the safety and efficacy of their work. But just as many of us applauded the benefits of such work and respected the moral enthusiasm that fueled the countless hours spent in laboratories.
In 2020, I watched as we wielded our moral enthusiasm like machetes. With edges sharpened on the stone of good intent, our words often macerated anything in their ideological paths. We unfriended others on Facebook. Some of us even posted terse announcements that we were taking a break from social media altogether. And some of us held such aggregious views that others canceled us (or we canceled them). Paradoxically, people across political, social, and educational spectrums were equally enthusiastic, equally confident of their moral compulsions: police or no police, face masks or no face masks, vaccine or no vaccine, in-person schooling or no in-person schooling, incumbent president or no incumbent president. We ruminated within the four walls of our homes. Sometimes, our ruminations morphed into alien beings with lives of their own, and like mad scientists, we took pleasure in our creations.
But as we leave 2020 and look forward to 2021, we face a real dilemma: how do we promote and nuture moral enthusiasm that has the power to positively change systems, cultures, and even nations without destroying individuals? It would be foolish to suggest that there is an easy solution to this dilemma. History is a mausoleum of moral enthusiasts and those who suffered under their reigns. Yet, it’s also a memorial of moral enthusiasts and those who prospered under their reigns. What to do, what to do. . .
Dalrymple may not have the solution to our dilemma (who could?), but he offers sage words that seem particularly apt for our future:
The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviors. In their humble struggle is true heroism.
This is a New Year’s resolution worth adopting, I think. To be decent despite everything, to improve what is in my power to improve, to refuse to see myself as a savior, to live humbly in my enthusiasm. For me, it will be a daily (hourly?) struggle, but the fruits of this labor may be the bravest, noblest struggle of all.
