Symbols Grow From Flawed Soil: Judging People by Direction, Not Purity
Every so often I receive a letter that is really an indictment dressed up as a question. The symbols a free Russia might one day claim, the writer says, are compromised goods. One of them helped build the hydrogen bomb. Another was tainted by ugly prejudice. So what kind of freedom is it, the writer concludes, that produces such soiled emblems? Behind the sneer there is a genuine and serious problem, and it deserves a serious answer. The problem is this: we want our heroes clean. We want the people who fought tyranny to have been free of every stain, and when we discover they weren’t, we feel cheated, and the cheated feeling slides quickly into contempt. I think this demand for purity is one of the most corrosive habits of the moral imagination, and I want to explain why. ...