Ethics

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. ...

There is a mood that settles over you if you read the news for long enough. It is the conviction that the world is sliding backward, that whatever decency the twentieth century managed to assemble after its catastrophes is now coming apart, and that we are entering an age of cynicism and brute force from which there is no return. I feel the pull of this mood as much as anyone. When cities are bombed and children are buried, when liars are rewarded and the brave are imprisoned, it seems almost obscene to suggest that humanity is, on balance, becoming gentler. And yet I want to argue exactly that. Not as consolation, and not by closing my eyes to the horror, but because I think the despair is partly a trick of perspective, and that the genuine direction of history, seen across centuries rather than weeks, is the slow and stubborn deepening of humanism. ...

When I was little, it was in Ukraine that I first learned what nationalism is. It was there that people started calling me “moskal” and “katsap,” words whose meaning I didn’t fully understand until I asked my parents. Nationalism was foreign to me, but I saw it in the dull, hardened eyes of the little girls who taunted me. For some reason it was always the girls… There it was, right in front of me — this strange, incomprehensible, baseless, embittered nationalism. ...