A good man is hard to find

Just before the US presidential election of 2008, I remember having a conversation with someone about Senator John McCain, who was running against Barack Obama.  After some back-and-forth discussion about McCain's policies and record, she said, with an air of finality, "He's a good man."

I've been thinking recently about this and about the idea of legacy.  What is it that makes a person good?  At what point can you look at someone's life and objectively say, "He was a good man"?

Let's leave aside the obvious answer that someone we know, love, or already admire is going to have much more of an opportunity to claim that title.  Not knowing someone, their story, or their background leaves us, I feel, much more liable to judge harshly.

Clearly, the reason that this is problematic is that none of us are perfect.  Like drops of black paint added to a bucket of white, each of our mistakes, errors, failures, sins—call them whatever you want —changes the balance of good and bad in our souls, in some cases barely perceptibly, but as anyone who's ever painted a bedroom or a bathroom will tell you, almost white is not white.

Yet we can all recite a list of people whom we consider essentially good: Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Grandma, our children.  Ourselves.

So if we have these two truths—some humans are good, and no-one is perfect—then we must have a measure or a standard of goodness.  Maybe, like the ancient Egyptians, we have some kind of cosmic scales on which we metaphorically weigh our hearts.  Maybe there's a way to add up all the good we've done and place it next to all the evil we've done.  And if so, what's the tipping point?  50%?  If I can say that I've done more evil than good over the course of my life, then I can claim to be a good person.  Right?  That seems fair.

But now we run into some other, more murky issues.  Do some deeds count more or weigh more heavily than others?  Is murder 1,000 times worse than running a stop sign?  If I then run 1,001 stop signs over the course of my life - come to California if you don't believe it's possible - am I now worse than a murderer?  Or does committing murder make me evil, regardless of how much good I do before or after?  And what about good deeds?  Do some count more than others?  Is holding the door open for a lady a good deed, or is it just basic human decency?  Or is it condescending and archaic, thus adding to your myriad run stop signs and other nefarious deeds in your life?

Maybe we can agree on just making sure we obey all laws.  If you don't break the law, you're a good person.  This is problematic too.  What laws are we talking about?  Different countries have different laws.  Heck, different families have different laws.  I know you can't go to prison for teasing your younger brother (although I'm willing to hear arguments for it), but just like any society, our household operates under certain rules.  Or are minors exempt?

Aren't some laws, let's face it, inconvenient or foolish?  And aren't some—Jim Crow and other segregationist policies—downright immoral?  And surely it's possible to keep all laws and still be a horrible person.  It's not against the law, for example, to lie to my wife and tell her that I've been working diligently in the garden when I've actually been binge-watching The Great British Baking Show.  It's not even illegal to cheat on one's spouse, but most people would agree that it's a pretty despicable act, all the same.  There are many people who make a very good living out of helping people do lawful, but arguably unethical actions, such as managing our money so that we pay as little tax as possible.  And that's the key, isn't it?  "Arguably".

It is very hard to establish whether someone is "good" or not when we have considerable differences of opinion over what is right or wrong.  And if that's the case, it must be true that we do not all have the same standards of morality.

Does morality change with location?  With time?  With administration?  If I attempted to enslave my children or my neighbors, people would be outraged, yet Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and he seems to have been given a pass by most of us.  The discussion over statues of historical figures, such as Winston Churchill, whose lives, actions, and thus legacies, are rendered far more complex after an objective view of history or a rethinking of our values, is another good example of this.

A good man?

So, to recap, we don't have a way of determining how much good a person needs to do to be considered good.  Nor do we have a universal standard against which we can measure actions and determine them to be good or bad.

It's a bit of a mess, and we haven't even looked at actions that could be deemed immoral but "don't hurt anybody" or unintentionally committed crimes (or even accidentally committed good actions), or thoughts and ideas that are immoral but aren't acted upon.

I don't think it's a stretch to say, though, that regardless of the apparently arbitrary standards we set for ourselves (or is it only for others?), we have all done things that are either illegal, unethical, or immoral, even if we've never been caught.

So where does that leave us?  None of us are Jesus.  None of us are as evil as Adolf Hitler.  Most would say it is reasonable to assume that we all fall somewhere between those two extremes.  Where on that spectrum does good end and evil begin?  And who determines that?

It seems as if many of us have fallen into one of two camps.  First, we have those who have a sliding scale of morality.  It changes by situation, location, time period, and intention and becomes a personalized morality that we essentially adjust as necessary.  The cynic would say we do this so that we make sure we fit somewhere on the good spectrum, along with our friends, family, and those who vote the same way we do.  Realistically, then, the only people we can truly judge are ourselves because we know that others have a different idea of what is moral.  Or worse, we expose ourselves as hypocrites because we overlook or even excuse actions we would usually consider immoral in people we know or like, such as our preferred presidential candidates.  It's an "us versus them" approach to morality.

The other camp consists of those of us who basically say that everything is permissible.  Because we cannot agree on what constitutes moral behaviour, and any attempt to enforce it creates unfairness, unnecessary restriction, and abuse of power, then we leave people to their own devices.  "Hey, do your thing.  As long as you're not hurting anyone, who am I to judge?"  It sounds good, doesn't it?  What's interesting, though, is that by not judging, we are actually judging.  When we say, "I'm not judging you", I am not only making a judgement, I am implicitly judging your behaviour as acceptable.

There is a third camp, whereby you assume that all humans are evil.  William Golding, particularly in Lord of the Flies, has a lot to say about this.  So does the Bible.  So do, interesting enough, a lot of pieces of literature which explore the darker side of humanity.  Personally, I subscribe to this point of view—that humans are redeemed but inherently immoral—but there aren't a lot of people I know who consider themselves evil.  In a recent interview on NPR, archeologist Sarah Parcak said, "In spite of all the terrible things we have done to each other, I think we're 51% good."  While this is clearly meant as a statement emphasizing the speaker's hope for humanity, rather than an empirical evaluation, it does speak to the tendency we have as humans—even as we recognize evil in others and not in ourselves—to believe the best of our race.  And while believing the best in others can be wonderful, it can also cause us to be myopic.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry is confronted by the complex legacy of several characters about whom he had very clear-cut beliefs.  Albus Dumbledore, his hero, was seduced as a young man by Grindelwald's ideas, causing great suffering in his own family.  Godric Gryffindor took the sword, which only presents itself to the valiant in times of need, from the goblins who made it.  Remus Lupin, another mentor, attempts to abandon his wife and child.  And then, of course, there's Severus Snape, whose hatred for Harry cannot be disregarded even after we find out the depths of his bravery and love.  Harry's conflicting emotions regarding Dumbledore, in particular, threaten to derail his entire quest to defeat Voldemort, and he has to learn the nuanced view of humanity that his godfather Sirius tries to teach him two books earlier: "The world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters."  We always struggle when someone we idolize turns out to have previously unknown faults: witness the fallout over the recent discovery of Ronald Reagan using racist language.

If there's a story that helps us understand our difficulty with processing morality, it is Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find".  In it, a prim southern grandmother comes face to face with an escaped convict called The Misfit.  At the start of the story, it is clear who is good and who is evil.  By the end, we see the selfishness and arrogance of the grandmother and we listen to the background and rationale of The Misfit's actions, and as we honestly evaluate their characters, we are forced to objectively and baldly conclude that they are essentially the same—or at least that they are no different.

It seems that we could apply some of the nuance required to study literature to our own views when it comes to the innately flawed people on whom we pass judgement.  Neither we nor those we love are as good as we think.  By the same token, neither we nor those we despise are as evil as we think.  I don't think it does us any good to claim that someone's legacy is anything other than complex, and if we are convinced otherwise, we should at least be prepared for legitimate challenges to our view.

To do otherwise is to propose that those we put on pedestals—both figurative and literal— are not human.