TOO TRUE TO BE GOOD

There seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
There seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand.    Susan Wolf
 
Is it possible to be too good a person?  As I used to say to my kids all the time, everything is possible, but not everything is likely.  And being “too good” falls into that category.
 
Susan Wolf is a moral philosophy who has a refreshingly realistic attitude.  I admit to being a second-hand consumer of her life’s work (taking me out of the “too good” metric immediately), yet even if I knew only this one pithy saying of hers, I would admire her. For those of us who read the Bible, it comes as no surprise that what distinguishes us as human beings is the value of our imperfections.
 
There is a lot of emphasis in this world about how much the same we are. Except for miniscule differences and infrequent anomalies, every human body is exactly the same in every measurable way. The very presumption of the United States is not only that we are all created equal (I acknowledge, not the same as “the same”), but that we have endowed rights – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness among them.  The three Abrahamic religions insist on definitive sameness.  In Judaism, there is one manner of law for all.  In Christianity, God loves every saint and sinner. In Islam, the Five Pillars are the aspiration of every person, Muslim or not.  Perfect law, perfect love, perfect submission – these idealized teachings give the impression that there is no such thing as “too good.”
 
But all those traditions (and all the others) are filled with stories of the failures of their greatest role models.  Even the Dalai Lama engaged with Keith Raniere! (And please, no diverting arguments about the nature of that engagement.)
 
Those flaws are, in my opinion, worth celebrating. And according to Susan Wolf, they are hard-wired at some level. The animal kingdom has no ethics; the behaviors we attribute to pets and wildlife, whether love, loyalty, suspicion, or evil, are all the reactions of instinctual proclivities to environmental circumstances. Dogs don’t sit around discussing the relative value of trees versus hydrants. We human beings, on the other hand, have systemic ways of addressing appropriate and inappropriate conduct. We share ideas, experiences, and imaginings not only on a one-to-one basis in the present, but across geography, culture, and generations. We speculate. And we aspire.
 
 
And we fail, a lot.  Perhaps it is why every one of those systems of definitive moral sameness has an embedded process for atonement. Being good all the time is virtually impossible. And those who set that standard for themselves (and therefore expect that others can as well) are mostly – sorry, not sorry – insufferable.  There seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand, within ourselves and in other people.
 
I am not advocating for immoral behavior, nor excusing my ethical lapses or yours. I may see the value in some occasional mischief, and I will plead guilty to plenty of it myself (and mostly enjoying it).
 
I am suggesting, however, that the quest for moral perfection in ourselves or others is unnatural and even undesirable.  The big and obvious transgressions in our lives are like obstacles on the highway – avoidable and necessitating a change of course or a full stop.  But so many other things that call for judgment in the moment will get past us.  If they did not, we would never learn to be better than we already are. The moral limits Wolf imagines embedded in our beings are the inherent prompts that, ironically, are necessary to our moral growth.
 
Not so long ago, I reflected on an observation by Ernst Gombrich about delight residing between boredom and confusion.  Likewise, morality exists between external absolutism and internal self-indulgence.  Whew, that’s a lot of pretentious words. I guess what I mean to say is this: give yourself a break.