Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

Beautiful essay.

I don't have a problem with inherited wisdom and values, if they are truly felt. Not everyone can craft an ethos for himself. Or find one.

The thing that so complicates life and free will and our sense of the good, (or one thing), is that there are so many ethoses to choose from.

Duty and self-sacrifice for a higher good are one dominant strain. But, a competing one is solipsism. Creating an idiosyncratic moral nook for oneself in a universe one perceives has having no absolutes. This often takes the shape of lovers living in a cocoon, sacrificing for each other, but for nothing else. Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, charismatic sociopaths do this too. Think Jonestown.

I go back to the comparison between Casablanca and The English Patient. Three lives don't amount to a hill of beans compared to fighting Nazis vs. My lover's life is far more important than fighting Nazis.

I think these days, in the West, a whole crapload of people would make the latter choice, and feel it was the moral choice. We root for Aragorn and Frodo, but would we be Aragorn and Frodo? Let alone the King of Rohan and Faromir (who should have whacked his father upside his head, imo, but for the good of Gondor, not himself).

Benjamin Cisko chooses a celibate, mysterious mingling with ascetism and alien godhead over Jake and Kassidy and hearth and home. How many people would really do that?

I don't know how many would really have done it in, say, 1925. But, then there would have been a sense of shame in letting down the side.

Maybe that's what we've lost. Shame, stigma. Unlike many people I know, I'm not averse to guilt. When it's earned, it ought to be felt.

So, here's to duty and (appropriate) shame. They are two of the building blocks of civilization.

It's late. I'm punchy. Sorry if I wandered more than usual.