But the main cause was the other experience: watching as half my
countrymen gave their support to this Bushite regime, well after the
evil of these leaders –their dishonesty, their bullying, their
arrogance, their utter disregard for any larger good than their own
self-aggrandisement– had become starkly visible.
What kind of creatures are these humans, these experiences seem to have
caused me to wonder, even below the level of consciousness, when those
who seem to be among the best of people will act so dishonorably, and
when so large a proportion of humanity can choose the evil and call it
good?
I read a book review in the recent October 2 issue of THE NEW REPUBLIC.
The book under review was FEAR: ANTI-SEMITISM IN POLAND AFTER
AUSCHWITZ, and it tells the shocking story of how –even after the Nazis
had been defeated, and the concentration camps liberated– a wave of
killings, by ordinary Poles, of the remnant of the Jews still alive in
Poland. The review quotes a contemporaneous statement by the Polish
journalist, Wincenty Bednarczuk, made in the wake of this “bloodbath”:
“We hypothesized that the frightening tragedy of the Polish Jews would
cure the Poles of anti-Semitism. It cannot be any other way, we
thought, but that the sight of massacred children and old people must
evoke a response of compassion and help…But we didn’t know human
nature… It turned out that our notions about mankind were naive. The
country surprised us.”
I understood Bednarczuk’s painful surprise.
Since the traumatic discovery of what my own countrymen were willing to
embrace –and my subsequent discovery that there is plenty of ugly
intolerance and viciousness on
both
sides of our divided country– I have found myself drawn to reading
Jonathan Swift, whose cleverness I’d always appreciated, but whose
misanthropic views of our species I’d found repugnant.
Earlier this month, sitting in an airport looking at the throngs of
hundreds of people I don’t know, I found my subtly implicit feelings
toward those strangers to have a different flavor from what I’ve been
accustomed to having all the previous decades of my life. My accustomed
feeling has always been fairly open-hearted, appreciative, embracing
(albeit in a shy way). But now I found myself feeling more detached,
untrusting, vaguely recoiling.
I missed my old feeling. It seemed like a light and warmth of great
value had gone out of my life, out of the world. When I asked, on those
radio shows, “Are you glad about what you feel toward people generally,
or do you wish you felt something different?” I knew from inside what
it meant to wish to see my fellow human beings and to feel toward them
differently.
And I do believe that something like my old feelings are what I should
still strive for. I do not believe that they were simply naive. In my
view, the spiritually most enlightened place for a person to reach is
one where the evils people do are not what define them in one’s eyes.
Not that we are such perfect creatures by nature. But the world is a
sick place and we humans are, in various ways, the carriers of the
sickness. (My PARABLE OF THE TRIBES offers an explanation of that
sickness that does not require any indictment of human nature.) I do
believe that, if properly nurtured, people grow into something
beautiful. But even if we are not so splendid, we are what we are, we
are what we can be.
If I could choose, I would not turn away from knowing fully what is
dark in human beings, but I would still regard my fellows with an open
and compassionate heart. “Hate the sin but love the sinner.” That
sounds to me like wisdom, and it is what I aspire to return to again.
It is likely my own hurt and fear that have pulled me away into my dimmer view of my kind.
That and my confusion. For I’ve been having trouble integrating in my
heart what I have experienced of people. (An alternative framing for
that radio show was from a different angle:
Has anyone ever surprised you greatly by acting either
much better or much worse than the person you thought them to be would
act? Have you ever had an important experience of someone you thought
basically good did something surprisingly bad? Or an experience where
someone you’d written off as a bad person did something unexpectedly
fine?
Have you ever struggled to understand the ways that people are mixtures of the good and the not-good?
Living in this fallen world takes a toll on all of us.)
And so for now I will try to regard my own current attitude itself with
some compassion and patience– even while I hope that I will heal enough
to be able once again to become again more innocent in my heart, even
without being naive.
Good will toward men. Not as an acquittal. More simply, as an act of
love. For it is love, after all, that ultimately heals us and our world.
Writings 
A couple of weeks ago, I did a radio show to Virginia, and after that one in Minnesota, that was framed by these questions: 
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