Being decent is hard work
For the second time in six months, I am teaching a course on George Orwell, this one paired with Hannah Arendt. I have been reading and thinking about these two writers for 45 years, and they are still surprising me and teaching me.
My students are also teaching me. All adults, they want to be there, do the work, and emerge as better and wiser citizens. “Better”? Well, yes, as in, possessed of greater virtue and goodness.
Defining goodness
Can I define goodness? I could say, as the Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, that I can’t define it, but “I know it when I see it.”
I saw it in my late friend Jean, who cleaned the building where I worked after hours. We talked, mostly about football. She had an almost palpable goodness. It filled the space between us.
I saw it in my Dad. He kept his charitable deeds hidden if he could. And, like St. Philip Neri, he played the fool at times to obscure the size of his heart.
Is goodness a natural gift? For some, yes. I think it was for Jean. But, mostly, I think goodness is a discipline. It must be learned, relearned and nurtured. One adopts habits — like humility, good manners and listening — and they gradually take hold. Hard work.
I recently heard a preacher say: Thank the person who first introduced you to your best self. I asked my wife who that was for her. It was her first grade teacher, Mrs. Dusenberry.
Me too. Mine was Sister Mary Lois. She could not have been anything but a sister and a teacher. And she loved to laugh. My sixth grade teacher, Sister Macrina, showed a number of kids their best selves. She often seemed exhausted.
My high school Latin teacher, Fr. Dunn, certainly taught me some disciplines of goodness. Though simplicity and kindness seemed to come naturally to him. He visited my mother in the hospital and anointed her when she was dying, though she was not of his parish and he’d met her only once, decades before.
He came on his day off. Like Sister Mary Lois, his vocation could not have been otherwise.
Being decent
The Orwell we are reading this time is “Homage to Catalonia,” his book on the Spanish civil war, and perhaps his finest. He wrote that if someone had asked him what he was fighting for in Spain, he would have said, “simple decency.”
This is the most important word that one can associate with Orwell, decency. Decency is the collective expression of minimal goodness.
And just as goodness is not abstract but concrete — not an expression of “the” Platonic good, but a succession of practical acts — decency is not an idea or a code, but a habit. A discipline. Orwell, like the American founders, believed in public and private virtue, and the cultivation of both.
My wife and I like going to the movies. Recently we have seen a triptych of movies about goodness.
One was the film “Perfect Days,” about a man who cleans toilets for a living and loves music and trees. He lives a monastic life and his mission, each morning, is to do his work well, spread kindness, and enjoy the day. The film is a mediation in moving pictures.
The second was, “One Life” — the story of how a self-described “ordinary” Englishman, Nicholas Winton, saved 669 children from death at the hands of the Nazis, in Czechoslovakia, in 1938.
And the third was “Cabrini,” about a woman who fought for the rights of immigrants, faced down blatant bigotry, built hundreds of hospitals and orphanages, and became the first American saint.
Orwell’s description of war in “Homage to Catalonia” is clinical and unstinting: the stupidity; the mud; the lice; the human and animal waste; the wanton sacrifice of youth. He chronicles it all so honestly that one sometimes has to put down the book.
And yet he writes: “Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.”
The fascist temptation
Our course is really an attempt to define fascism and understand the power of its temptation. Like describing goodness, this is not simply or succinctly possible. But surely if fascism is anything it is the renunciation of decency — the mocking of it.
Hannah Arendt also found the evils of fascism and totalitarianism to be complex. She dissected both. But evil, like goodness, holds a mystery at its core. She believed that thought had to be suspended for evil to prevail. People had to quit thinking.
Orwell thought that, too. Indecency requires no discipline. He insisted that we think about the existence of evil, and the possibility of goodness.