Even Brent Can Get Better

It’s tough being a liberal. Our moral center is that everyone has inherent worth, that everyone has the ability to improve, that that there is no us against them, that everyone is part of us. What makes it tough is that we have to argue against the tribalists without becoming tribalists. The temptation is so strong to say that the tribalists are terrible people, not like us. The problem is that when we do that, we are adopting attitudes, attitudes antithetical to our own.

I hear people that advocate rehabilitation for criminals not punishment, that think the answer to social decay is to help those that have problems with substance abuse and other self-destructive behaviors, not to punish them; think that conservatives are beyond redemption. That we shouldn’t try to change their minds, that we should treat them as enemies. This is a self-destructive behavior; it feeds their sense of victimhood and makes them more extreme.

Then it gets meta; I have to fight my gut reaction to treat the tribalists of the left as part of them, instead of part of us. It isn’t easy to turn the other cheek, but if it were easy, we wouldn’t have such a need to do so.

This will probably be taken down very soon as posting episodes of TV on YouTube is both illegal and immoral, but I’ll take advantage of it being there now to teach morality. The source of course is The Good Place; the only sitcom whose premise is exploring moral philosophy.

I bet I have friends that watched this, were inspired by this, but then went on thinking that we shouldn’t try and make those whose attitudes we find immoral better, that we should try to crush them.

I know it’s a sitcom, it’s not reality, but people do change. One of the most remarkable developments of my lifetime was the evolution of society’s feelings towards same-sex marriage. It’s gone from being thought outrageous to something that a strong majority feel is right. People were not lost cause homophobes; they were capable of change. We need to keep reminding ourselves of that.

Categorical thinking blinds us to the complexity of human nature. When I was living on City Island, I often had to change buses in the middle of Pelham Bay Park. One day I got caught there in pouring rain without an umbrella. I looked and felt like a drowned rat. Cars drove past me without giving a second thought. Then a pickup truck pulled over and the driver offered me a ride. He said he couldn’t just leave me drenched in the rain; that people have to help each other. Then as we drove through the park, he started to complain about the black people living on the island. Was he a good person as he went out of his way to help a total stranger in need? A good Samaritan? Or was he a bad person, a racist, that judges others by whether they are in his tribe? The answer is yes; he was both at the same time. Calling him either a good person or a bad person hides part of the truth. He was a person; a victim of a series of accidents as are we all. He was not a person I wanted to have more to do with. I can’t spend all my life trying to reform others. But there’s hope for him. He knows it’s important to help people, but he has terribly distorted view of which people count. They all count; blacks, gays, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, atheists, Evangelical Christians, and Trump supporters. That’s the essence of liberal values.

I’ll get off my soap box now, eat my taylorhameggandcheese sandwich and drink my coffee. Those things are not complex, they are pure good.