Dignity, Integrity, and Ladles

Author’s Note: During some late night reflections, I’ve decided go ahead and try to do a full Aristotelian triangle approach on this substack. It’s the only thing that felt natural and honest. Since this is pseudo-anonymous -or anonymish, which is clearly a better word construction than pseudo-anonymous- I figured I would share a bit more pathos and ethos than I had originally intended. Logos to follow in some case studies and then I’ll do the prologue for “A Boring Utopia.” The above clip is from “Tomorrowland” and has the tone I aspire to create here.

Dignity

Several years ago, I was a first responder at a car accident. Or rather, I was the first person to respond at a car accident. I’m not an EMT or anything. I simply saw an accident, pulled over, called emergency services, and spoke to each driver to ensure that no one was in any immediate danger. Apart from what I figured was one probable concussion -based on the medical expertise I’ve acquired watching shows like ER, Grays Anatomy, and House as well as a week long First Aid training class they taught at the sawmill when I worked there for a few summers between college- everyone seemed fine. An ambulance arrived something close to four minutes later. They’d been nearby eating sandwiches.

I got back in my own car, breathed a deep breath of relief, and my first thought was I should post about this on my Facebook.

This was an ugly thought.

What would be the point? I hadn’t really done anything. Yes, I’d called emergency services but another driver had done the same thing only a few seconds later. Everyone was mostly fine. While I had briefly imagined having to use my bare hands to staunch pulsing wounds, and thought I was prepared to do so, it had not actually been required. All I’d done was quickly say hello, given a brief inspection, and told them that they looked okay to me. It’s not like I needed anyone on my Facebook to do anything. Even if I did, my Facebook friends weren’t qualified to help. The two drivers were already with Emergency Services. All the actions that needed to be taken had been taken.

So why would I really tell anyone?

So they could think I was a good person?

A year or so prior to this, my great uncle Jack passed away. He was a quite simple man -my test of economic class, coming from the community I came from, has always been how valuable people think fast food meal toys will become as a function of time and Jack hoarded them obsessively- who lived next door during most of my childhood and liked to mow people’s lawns to show his concern and sing opera even though he didn’t know any of the words. He had really big earlobes and it made him laugh when me or my brother would try to touch them. There was a table at his funeral full of pictures. A lot of them from WWII. Some of him riding a horse and holding a machine gun, some of him standing in line with other soldiers. And also an ancient pack of cigarettes with a thank you note written on it by a Holocaust survivor because Jack had been with the force that liberated the camp and had given him the pack of cigarettes.

Not once, in his entire life, did Jack ever mention this to anyone other than my aunt. The closest he came, according to my father, was on a rare night when he got drunk and he muttered a few things to the effect of he wished he hadn’t had to eat his horse because it had been a good horse but what were you to do when you hadn’t had hardly any food in a week and besides the horse was also starving? And also that it was better to sit on top of a few dead Germans than it was to sit in the mud if you were stuck in the trenches for a long while. They kept you off the ground, and they didn’t mind so much as they were already dead.

According to my aunt, he felt that as he hadn’t had to shoot anyone and the guards surrendered, his involvement was minimal and he really couldn’t take much credit for giving someone a pack of cigarettes or just walking with a bunch of his friends. Besides, he’d gotten the cigarettes for free.

I think civilization is built out of people like my uncle Jack. That sort of quiet, unassuming dignity glues the whole thing together. Societies work when people do the right thing, not for anyone to view and celebrate, but just for themselves to know that they’ve done something good and that it’s not a big deal because everyone does it. It’s the only emotion powerful enough and deep enough to get everyone to do all the kinds of unpaid work they need to do in order to keep everything working.

Call me an optimist but I think we all feel the desire to be clean inside as well as out. The thought God, just let me not feel filthy takes hold of us and even people who otherwise do very bad things will have to go out and do something kind for someone else just to balance the scales. A civilization only works when it makes space for that kind of dignity.

For the interested, I posted something very close to this observation as a self-deprecating joke to my Facebook. I deleted it not long after. Deleted Facebook I mean, not just the joke. Even the joke felt gross, in retrospect. Even writing this now, feels somewhat disgusting. There are some good deeds that we should only do in the dark, not for others to know we are good but so that we can know we are good.

Integrity

My wife and I named my son after the mill mechanic, who was my father’s best friend and also strangely the most clever man I have ever known in my life. We’ll call him Dutch for the sake of this story. I have had interactions with two Nobel laureates and neither of them were so quick or so clever as Dutch. It was like he was an actor, who had been given a script with every line he’d ever have to say in his whole life and he’d just blurt it out before you had a chance to say two or three words of your part. And it’s not like he said something that didn’t match what you were going to say. It’s like he’d already known the whole thought you were intending to communicate, deduced all the subtleties, and didn’t have to wait for you to actually say it out loud. He was like a super-computer, running an instance of whoever he was speaking to on his internal processor, and running that instance faster than even that person could. Some of his insults are the stuff of legend, and the only comparable figure I know of in popular culture is the late comedian Patrice O’Neal.

Dutch liked to smoke, drink, and gamble. And also fight. His favorite fight story to tell was how he had been repeatedly thrown over a bar by a state wrestling champion. He had a specific way of acting this out with his hands, somehow grabbing himself by the front of his own shirt and heaving himself back and forth across a room. Also a story of how he’d been playing a game of baseball -my hometown’s sawmill against another town’s sawmill- only to realize while on third base that he’d slept with the umpire’s wife and that the umpire looked like he’d just realized it and wanted to get even when Dutch tried to run home. This led to him refusing to walk out a home run and a giant near fight between both teams.

I only ever saw him out of his cover-alls at weddings and funerals. And I guess probably when he played baseball but that was before I was born. No matter what he wore, you could usually see a shine of grease all over his body. I suppose most college-educated people looked down on him, but if you ever beat him at cribbage then you beat him by luck, and the occasional engineer who came to the mill to do something or other usually just signed off on whatever Dutch said should be done. He wasn’t the kind of person you’d think someone would name their child after. He never had any children of his own and he tried to signal vice whenever possible. He valued being left alone with a carton of cigarettes, a case of Rainier beer, and some old cowboy movies. His father was a blind piano tuner, and his mother was an ex-nun that had been seduced out of the covenant with music and everything about Dutch was equally as improbable. In the kitchen drawer of humanity, he was a ladle, adamantly refusing to let you open the drawer all the way without having to make accommodations for him first.

I think my wife and I mostly named our son after him because he was also the kind of person to do things like secretly fund a very small grade-school’s free lunch program. Secretly, as in he went about it for over a decade like it was some kind of crime or high-stakes embezzling scheme. One of the teacher’s -I don’t know who, but my guess is she was from the city and didn’t understand why Dutch had done this secretly- caught wind of it and decided it had to be celebrated and put together an assembly and word got out. Everyone called him a softie, and you would have thought he’d been accused of some kind of unimaginable crime because it was the only time in his life he ever seemed to be embarrassed or ashamed of himself. In an environment where a co-worker’s weakness can cause you to be eaten alive by an auger and reduced into a bloody pulp there’s little romanticism about charity.

“What was I supposed to do? They’re goddamn kids!” he’d shout, and then he’d look at you like he’d done something really bad, unforgivable even, and was begging you to understand why he’d had no other choice. I’m still a real bastard, he’d say with his eyes, I still curse at the mill super-intendant to his face, I still run out of bars with blood on my fists, it’s just that they were little kids and someone had to make sure they were fed. I think it later turned out there was some kind of paperwork problem that probably could have been fairly easily resolved that some relation of his didn’t know how to solve, but I don’t really know. All I do know is he just never worried about it because the important part was that the kids were fed. He did other things like that. Making sure if someone was injured that their kids got sports gear. That their wife could pay for groceries. And each time he made such an intervention, he gave it the same premeditation as if he was planning a murder. You didn’t do stuff like that for show. You did it because you were compelled to do it. And you certainly wouldn’t want a guy who put his life in your hands every time he crawled inside of a saw to fix something thinking that you were the sort of person who did things just for show.

He died recently and we miss him very much.

I think of Dutch and my uncle Jack a lot when people spout off online about what a good person they are and why such and such a person did something unforgivable. Virtue signaling, or whatever you want to call it. And I want to say, “I knew a man who walked into hell when he was barely a teenager and sat on dead Germans so he wouldn’t have to sit in the mud and ate his own horse, and gave his cigarettes to a Holocaust survivor. He liked to mow lawns and sing opera even though he didn’t know the words and one day he was sure Happy Meal toys would be worthy millions of dollars. I knew a man who didn’t make much money and gave as much of it as he could to a bunch of poor kids because it was more important that they eat than someone somewhere fill out some piece of paperwork the right way. And he did it even though it hurt his reputation to do it. You don’t remind me of them at all.”

Except that would also be virtue-signaling and I feel gross and sanctimonious even writing that down here.

But look, I still did it anyway.

I never said that I was good. Dutch was always good to me, liked me even, but he never understood the writing thing. Why the hell would you care about some stranger knowing something was true so long as you knew it for yourself?

Ladles

I’m not going to bemoan that there aren’t people like this in the world anymore. I’m going to go a thousand steps further and bemoan that I think the incentives of our entire civilization are now set up in such a way that they’re being slowly driven into extinction. Every single person who lives in the modern era is massively incentivized to care about appearance more than reality. Remember back in the eighties and nineties how everyone was worried we’d live through an Apocalypse caused by television and nobody would be able to think anymore? I think it happened and that’s the world we are living in now.

How many times have you watched the news or listened to a friend explain how the world functions and then taken a step back and realized that the plot of the whole thing sounds very much like good guys and bad guys battling it out over some semi-magical thing that if only the good guys were to prevail all problems would be solved? There’s no discussion of trade-offs or competing interests. Indeed, there’s not even an understanding that trade-offs or competing interests can exist.

Reality is bizarre and so far as I have been able to discern, it has no political affiliation. It takes enormous effort to wrestle it into some kind of sense and the whole thing leaves any honest person with a headache. Then the world got even bigger and more complicated and suddenly the only tool we all shared to try to make it all make sense was cinema. I mean, how often do you hear a serious, middle-aged adult who has the actual authority to implement change compare real-world social problems to Harry Potter? And not even the books, but the films?

There’s a cancer spreading everywhere, and one of the symptoms of that cancer is that it’s more important to be like the idea of a human being in the movies than an actual breathing person with a bunch of weird planes and angles. Everything has to be clipped and edited down until it’s cinematically simple. I think that’s one of the reasons so many of us are able to simply philosophize about how hypothetically much we care about a theoretically infinite group of people and treat this the same as having actually moved a real-life atom on another person’s behalf. It’s why we can all enter filter-bubbles and never come out. The fiction is more compelling than the reality. You don’t even have to mow someone else’s lawn because they’re getting divorced. You can just post your support on social media.

When I was five, the plight of the Spotted Owl became a national concern. A very simple story took shape that evil loggers were destroying the planet and that a poor owl was the latest victim to fall under their vicious axes. News reports were televised. Shows were produced. Laws were passed. And slowly but surely, my whole community ground to a halt. We deserved it, didn’t we? That was what people thought, at least, when we looked for sympathy. After all, we were the evil loggers trying to kill an innocent owl. We were the ones destroying the world.

The exact set of sequences following is hard to describe in detail, but from the inside it was like living in a world that had never been very bright to begin with only for someone to start turning a dimmer switch.

By the time I was in junior high, I had a half dozen or so female classmates who became what you could only honestly describe as prostitutes. Their boyfriends were out-of-towners in their thirties and forties, city people who had good jobs, who could help their families get by if they looked the other way. Their male equivalents became drug dealers, pot first and then meth. A producer from the Jenny Jones show used to scout our student population to find kids for those “my teen is out of control” segments they used to run. I remember once getting an invitation to a friend’s fourteenth birthday party where he was also getting his one year sobriety chip because he’d decided to quite smoking meth since becoming a father and finding Jesus Christ. He promised if I also accepted Jesus Christ into my heart that there would be a king-size candy bar in it for me. By the time I was in high school -a kid burned down the high school on accident when I was a sophomore so we wound up moving the high school into a series of trailers- the town had built a whole other separate high school for all the unwed teen mothers, and it had about an equal size population as the “normal” high school. It seemed like every third person you walked by on the street was in the grips of some kind of psychosis. From fourth grade until I graduated at least one person died every year, whether by freak accident, their own hand, or murder. During my senior year, an unmediated schizophrenic woman killed a toddler in the park because her dog told her to do it.

The Spotted Owl population continued to decline even after logging efforts ceased. Then it kept on declining even after a bunch of legislation was passed to turn it around. It turned out the logging hadn’t really been at the root of the problem. Strangely, or not strangely at all because reality is strange and you shouldn’t expect real events to conform to a narrative, the Spotted Owl was simply being out-competed by another species called the Barred Owl and loggers hadn’t had a lot to do with it.

Oops.

No one was held accountable. No one was even shamed. By the time the fervor around what everyone wanted to be true died down, it seemed like there was no one with enough strength left to care. Who had energy left to fight a losing battle? If we brought it up the story would just get spun up again and no one could pick up that kind of political football. They’d probably just say something untrue, like the logging had never stopped even though it had. We lived in a world without long-term memory and a world that didn’t care about particulars.

The really complicated story we’d needed to tell, the unsatisfying but true story about forest management, replacement rates, and displaced species, had been pushed aside in favor of something stupidly cinematic. Good guys and bad guys. Facts and complications were narrative inconveniences and in the world of Big News and Big Advertising, those kinds of things couldn’t possibly hold the public attention. I saw the same kind of thing happen in Afghanistan. Then again in Iraq. Then again with COVID.

Think of the subject you know best. How often do you use words like “Always” and “Never” when you’re explaining that subject to people? How much more often do you use words like “Sometimes” and “It Depends?” How many parts of that subject are counter-intuitive, ie against intuition? Now think of how the news media describe almost every story.

For most of my life, I’ve been chewing away at what really caused all these problems in the back of my mind. On long walks. When I’m in my garage doing some kind of wood-working project. Taking it apart and putting it back together again. When I used to fire-watch at the mill I tried to find reasons that don’t feel like a story -I’d think of them in terms of stories of different places but really it was just ways of reimagining the current world- but instead felt like big, complicated machines. Explanations that felt mechanical, the way you’d watch the log-stacker put a piece of timber on the transfer deck to the de-barker  and then go to the other side of the mill and then see a lumber ready for transport.

I’d like there to be a world where people like my uncle Jack and the Dutch are common. Where there are big personalities and quiet dignities and nobody is forced to be cinematically simple because that’s all our institutions know how to handle. I want a drawer full of ladles that’s deep enough to open all the way. I want a world where being right matters and if you’re wrong that matters too. A world where people publicly say sometimes, it depends, and not always. I want a series of carrots and sticks that incentive people to be correct, to be honest, and to be themselves.

I’d like that to be the world my son grows up in because this is the one chance we’ve got to live, and whatever else happens you can’t be too tired to even try. This is our fault and that’s good because it means we can fix it. So let’s do our best to try and fix it.