Letter from the Editor: Goodness and Its Double
Christopher Bernard
One of many arguments I have with my liberal and progressive friends is their inability to come up with a coherent definition of goodness. They know what is “evil” (racism, sexism, homo- and transphobia, and the like), but when you ask them to define what is good, they either throw up their hands in dismay, became laughably abstract (“tolerance” is a non-starter: no one willingly tolerates what they think evil or fundamentally wrong; to defend it as a value is self-deception or hypocrisy), or actively attack it, claiming there is no universal understanding of “goodness” and in fact cannot be one – that “goodness” is defined differently among cultures and historical eras, and to believe in a universal goodness is part of the authoritarian logocentrism of the western Enlightenment project.
And that idea, even though I suspected it was based on a misunderstanding of cultural differences, stymied me for a long time.
Then, a number of years ago, I was given a project writing profiles of countries describing their manners, etiquette, and prejudices so that visitors, business travelers, diplomats and military personnel did not inadvertently make enemies.
My liberal friends were right, at least partly, and my researches seemed to prove it. But there was a catch.
All cultures distinguished right and wrong, “good” and “evil: behavior that was mandated or obligatory, and behavior that was condemned, often in the harshest terms.
If my friends were correct, surely at least some cultures would not have had that distinction at all. But not a single culture lacked a distinction between good and evil – or, more abstractly, between acts and behavior that were actively encouraged, up to the promise of eternal life and infinite joy after one’s death – and those that were punished, often very severely indeed: up to death by execution and perpetual torment in hell.
The differences lay in how cultures defined these distinctions, often at the apparently trivial level of everyday manners. Some glaring examples: When moving past someone in a theater row, in America you are expected to show your back to the sitters on your way to your seat; in some East European countries that is considered the height of rudeness, the human butt being the seat of the devil; you are expected to slip past your row mates while facing them, something many Americans find embarrassing.
In Japan, the default facial expression in an uncertain social situation is to smile at strangers, and the more the hostility they feel coming at them, the more brightly they will smile. But in Arabic countries, a smile at a strange male may likely be interpreted as a laugh at his expense, and he will immediately tag you as an enemy – and the brighter your smile, the deeper the hot water you may find yourself in.
And yet, despite these, often acute differences, as I wrote the profiles, I began to notice a curious consistency regarding fundamental moral values among all the cultures I was investigating. Though there could be great differences in the cultural expression of these values (and disvalues), the values themselves (along with their opposites) remained remarkably stable.
And I was able to isolate a few universal “virtues” that every culture valued (and I would tentatively submit this across history as well) – in every culture, these “virtues” were considered right and good, their opposites evil and wrong.
All cultures valued what we call “emotional intelligence” – the ability to read people correctly as to their emotional state: relaxed, tense, worried, angry, happy, sorrowful – and to show respect and understanding of it, either by what we did or said or, equally importantly, by what we refrained from saying or doing. A shorthand way of saying this might be: all cultures valued respect. And all cultures actively punished its opposite: disrespect.
All cultures valued living in the truth – what one might call, variously, honesty, sincerity, authenticity, “being real,” and the like, though, again, how one signaled this differed from culture to culture: too much honesty might be considered offensively rude in one culture, whereas defending people’s feelings from too harsh an expression of a truth might be considered hypocrisy and dishonesty in another. All cultures also punished what they considered untruthfulness.
All cultures valued courage. But the kind of courage often differed: one culture might value physical courage, as displayed in sports or in war while discounting moral courage (standing up to authority for one’s own understanding of the truth, for instance, or the good, which, in another culture, might be seen as an intolerable display of disrespect), whereas the reverse might be true in another culture, which might think overt displays of physical courage as barbarous or fascist, whereas moral and intellectual courage might seem the only form of courage worthy of a human being. Yet both cultures valued not allowing oneself to be governed by fear, and punished cowardice as they defined it.
And all cultures valued mercy – some called this love, some compassion, some loyalty, but all valued extending affection and care to those who needed it. The differences were to whom mercy was extended: to one’s immediate family only, to one’s clan or tribe, to one’s nationality, to one’s religion, to one’s race, to all humankind, or to all of life on planet earth. All cultures also condemned hatred, cruelty and disloyalty to what they defined as “their own.”
There are without doubt other universal understandings of human goodness, but I found these four to be foundational: no culture valued cowardice, for example, or dishonesty or lack of mercy, or disrespect to their own.
Nevertheless, cultural differences were real and often led to misunderstanding and conflicts, because all cultures defined differently two things: how these virtues were signaled (in other words, they differed in the semiotics of morality), and for whom they were practiced (they differed in the politics of morality; there was always an “in” group toward whose members the virtues must be practiced; when it came to strangers and especially rival or enemy groups, their reverse – dishonesty, disrespect, cruelty – were sometimes esteemed as virtues).
Another point: These differences not only existed between cultures, but also between classes and subgroups within cultures, along with the differences between “in-groups” and outsiders, in particular enemies or rivals.
These discoveries, which I have seen confirmed countless times, have helped me come up with a tentative universal definition of a “good human being”: one who is respectful of others, honest, courageous, and merciful. I would also expand the “in-group” for which such virtues were required to include all of humanity, indeed all living creatures on earth and, conceivably, elsewhere. (All four virtues, of course, need to work together; a person, for example, who is courageous without also being merciful, honest and respectful is almost the definition of evil in all cultures.)
We might add other “universal human goods”: physical and psychological health, practical intelligence, creativity and inventiveness, trustworthiness and responsibility, and many others. But these four – truthfulness, courage, respectfulness, and mercy – seem, at least to me at this point, to be the four virtues on which rests a human life worthy of being called “good.”
Now if we could only apply these basic virtues to our politicians, and hold them to this definition of goodness, we might have a polity worth respecting. I am not as cynical about politicians as some are – I believe most politicians are like most of the people I know: people with modest gifts and good intentions who are dealing as honorably as they can with the ambiguities and frustrations of the human condition and the treacheries of those who do not have their best interests at heart. Politics is partly defined as the having and making of many enemies met in perpetual battle; it is war by other means. And, as we have noted, the virtues to use against your enemies are precisely vices when aimed at your own. The temptations of hypocrisy and treachery in such a situation are, clearly, unending.
And so I think it is hardly controversial to say that not all politicians would pass even the simplest test of being “a good human being” defined as we have here: “Are you respectful and honest and courageous and merciful at least toward those you supposedly belong to?”
Senator Manchin? Senator Sinema?
Or many a Republican you know?
No. I didn’t think so.
Christopher Bernard is a founder and co-editor of Caveat Lector. His latest work is The Socialist's Garden of Verses, published by Regent Press and winner of a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence; it is also listed as one of the "100 Best Indie Books of 2021" by Kirkus Reviews.