A Lesson from Everfair

Decisions of when to fight, and where to fight, and how to fight, are never automatic; however decisive and clear an unjust incident may be, why does the responsibility to respond always fall on the shoulders of those we think are the most aggrieved?

Nisi Shawl's Everfair, proposes an alternative outcome to the late-19th, early-20th century genocide in the Congo perpetrated by Belgian King Leopold on the way to thoroughly expropriating the valuable resources of that African land. Mark Twain, who wrote several polemics denouncing the genocidal Belgian attack on the Congo (including King Leopold's Soliloquy), believed that Leopold ranked as one of the most villainous figures in all of world history.

"In fourteen years Leopold has deliberately destroyed more lives than have suffered death on all the battlefields of this planet for the past thousand years. In this vast statement I am well within the mark, several millions of lives within the mark. It is curious that the most advanced and most enlightened century of all the centuries the sun has looked upon should have the ghastly distinction of having produced this moldy and peity-mouthing hypocrite, this bloody monster whose mate is not findable in human history anywhere, and whose personality will surely shame hell itself when he arrives there--which will be soon, let us hope and trust," Twain wrote in the post-humous Mark Twain in Eruption.

In Shawl's alternative history novel, a diverse collection of demographically distinct groups, including faith-based, back-to-Africa, American blacks, European socialists, and native Africans, unite and eventually establish their own free state on parts of the Congo wrested by force from Leopold. The book is full of singular characters, important resurrected history, and subtle moral lessons. I haven't yet reached the end of the book, but before I do, I'd like to highlight one of those lessons.

One of Shawl's major characters, Lisette Toutournier, is a bi-racial Frenchwoman. She is smart, passionate and apparently fearless, a set of characteristics that makes her appearance in the Congo as a dedicated opponent of Belgian colonialism unsurprising. As the resistance to Leopold grows and the utopian Everfair begins to take shape, Toutournier finds enough free time to pursue a number of love affairs.

At a critical point in their affair, one of her lovers, a white European woman who has come to occupy a revered position in Everfair's pantheon of heroes, cluelessly insults Lisette's racial heritage; an incident that leaves Lisette both speechless and unwilling to continue their affair. But though the affair has ended, Lisette's lover cannot begin to guess the reason why.

Perhaps, by the end of the story, Lisette will have shared the pain and anger that she felt at the moment her lover so casually and ignorantly derided one of the central aspects of her identity. Regardless, the reader knows that Lisette's lover, a respected leader of Everfair, is nevertheless a product of the racism of her time and place. The reader also knows that it is not possible for Lisette, however gifted and disciplined she may be, to address and remediate all insults and the racism that underlies them.

This brings us (or me, anyhow) to #blacklivesmatter and the growing refusal of African Americans and their allies to stand aside in the face of police brutality and police killings in black communities nationwide. Huge numbers of white Americans seem surprised by the growing militance, though both that surprise and the number of white people who pretend or allow themselves to be surprised seems to be diminishing in the face of the persistence of #blacklivesmatter, North Carolina's Moral Monday Movement, and similar local and national groups.

The surprise white folks seem to feel is a fundamental manifestation of white privilege, which is ultimately the privilege to ignore the realities of one's surrounding community, or country, or world. It is more than a little ironic that white folks, who have for generations reaped the benefits of exploiting the black community, seem to need those same people to do one more thing for them; to clarify with endless patience what racism is, how it permeates our society, and how it is manifested and sustained in feigned shock at acts of black resistance and rage.

That white folks need such remedial instruction from black folks is outrageous. Fundamentally outrageous. After all, African Americans live every day with insults and assaults simply because of their skin color, and must decide to ignore so many of those insults and assaults so that they might instead both live their lives and maintain their sanity. Who has time in the face of the daily demands of life and the tactical demands of resistance to racism to also scrub clean the souls of white folks? 

That Sisyphean tasks reminds me of a truth I stumbled upon some years ago when I first wondered how many times a gay friend of mine needed to come out in order to best take care of himself and to move forward in solidarity with comrades organizing to resist homophobia in all its manifestations. Eventually it became clear that the question of coming out to new people in new places was an endlessly repeating requirement that he was forced to reconsider under constantly changing conditions.

It struck me then and seems equally clear to me now that addressing homophobia and racism are not primarily the responsibility of gay men and lesbians and bisexuals and transgender people or of African Americans. Indeed, if we are to rid the world of racism and homophobia, the main responsibility for rooting out such scourges belongs to those who carry those diseases in their most virulent forms. Straight people and white folks.

Postscript: I cannot resist adding that Shawl dedicates her book to Octavia Butler, whose books offer many lessons that complement Everfair. I reviewed one of those books, Parable of the Sower, a few years ago. To fight back in Parable's dystopian world, which shares many characteristics with our own, Butler develops a tool, a new religious "faith that that has no supreme being, only a profound and Buddhalike understanding of the world that humans must embrace, sharp points and sharp edges, notwithstanding. 'All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change,' she writes. In other words, there is nothing for it but to live in the world, and to see oneself as both responsible for what the world becomes and subject to its conditions at any given time. People are most present in the world when they are growing and changing.

I have to say that with Everfair, Nisi Shawl establishes herself as Octavia Butler's spiritual heir.

The Windup Girl

Florida governor Rick Scott probably won't read Paolo Bacigalupi's novel. But he should.

I let this fragment of a review linger incomplete, while Marrianne lent out our copy of the book (with my consent). I find that the notes I pencilled in the margins to be the basis for whatever else I might write about The Windup Girl are gone for now, perhaps for always. Is a piece half-done worth the trouble of reading it?

Probably. After all, it's probably less than 400 words. Who's going to pretend that they haven't ever before wasted the time it would take to read 400 words?

So Florida, the state likeliest to suffer most from rising sea levels caused by climate change, has, under the dubious leadership of Republican governor Rick Scott, developed a de facto policy that scrubs the use of terms like "climate change" and "global warming" from documents produced by state employees and contractors. Such a policy moves Scott to the very front rank of climate-change deniers and, given Florida's particular vulnerability, would likely make Scott a candidate for some kind of Darwin award if he wasn't also past his peak period of reproductive activity.

Scott probably isn't planning to read Paolo Bacigalupi's book, The Windup Girl, but it probably wouldn't make a whole lot of difference if he did. After all, one arrives at the end of the book considering the possibility that a variety of factors, including climate change, have already narrowed the global path to the point that we can stop worrying about Florida, which is bound to become swamp, and start worrying about our own skins, which are likely to sweat copiously and fry quickly for extended periods on both sides of high noon.

In Bacigalupi's dystopic world, most of us in the West are pretty much in the same boat as Floridians. The exceptions are likely to be chemists and geneticists and engineers working for global corporations that own seed copyrights, possess the firepower to enforce and exploit those copyrights, and do not let ethical considerations weasel their way into strategic plans. But the catastrophes that The Windup Girl imagines, predictions of a world less than, say, 50 years away, do not seem (with a few exceptions) like events from which we will run screaming, but more like moments we will watch like frogs in a hot tub, unaware that the temperature of the water is rising toward the boiling point.

Of course, some of us already recognize that the temperature is rising and some of us do what we can to address that developing problem. But Bacigalupi's point seems to be that whatever it is we are doing, it's not enough. And though some few of us will survive, sign on with one of those global corporations with the reach and power of government, or find a remote, little tub where the water is cooler, those survivors will find that the regret that they did not do enough is a crushing weight on what life they have left. The difference between their regrets, however, and the regrets of humans who are simply aging out and passing on, will be the difference between dying in the full knowledge that one has failed a most important moral challenge and dying ignorant of one's failure.

The Moral Challenge of Palestinian Rockets

I’m planning to write a long piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and my personal journey from Bar Mitzvah boy and teenage Zionist to an eventual supporter of Palestinian self-determination. But to even begin to understand that political transformation, I figure that I also need to look at how I grew up believing that no fate could be more noble than dying in the defense of the United States, the world’s greatest democracy, but by the time I was nineteen, arriving at the conclusion that the U. S. was waging a war of terror in Southeast Asia that I could not support.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, my freshman year at college (in 1965) was the beginning of dramatic personal change. I spent the latter half of that academic year sporadically attending classes at the University of Michigan and hanging out in coffee shops with anti-war activists for extended periods. I began, then, to move away from my youthful patriotism to a more critical view of American militarism and the war in Vietnam.

In the process, I was greatly influenced by the writings of Noam Chomsky, particularly individual essays that were later collected and published in the book American Power and the New Mandarins.  I’m rereading the book, now, trying to understand some of the emotional intensity of my political transformation some 40 years ago. And though I have every intention of following through with the aforementioned long piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I am discovering anew the power of what Chomsky wrote so long ago, and how resonant his book seems now. In particular, there are two quotes from the introduction that I would like to cite and explore here.

First: “No one who involved himself in antiwar activities as late as 1965, as I did, has any reason for pride or satisfaction. This opposition was ten or fifteen years too late. This is one lesson we should have learned from the tragedy of Vietnam.”

And this one: “By entering into the arena of argument and counterargument, of technical feasibility and tactics, of footnotes and citations, by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one’s humanity. This is the feeling I find almost impossible to repress when going through the motions of building a case against the American war in Vietnam. Anyone who puts a fraction of his mind to the task can construct a case that is overwhelming… In an important way, by doing so he degrades himself, and insults beyond measure the victims of our violence and our moral blindness. There may have been a time when American policy in Vietnam was a debatable matter. This time is long past… The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us, who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction—all of us who would have remained silent had stability and order been secured. It is not pleasant to use such words, but candor permits no less.”

Here Chomsky calls himself out twice. In the first quote he says that he was unconscionably late in his opposition to the Vietnam War. “Ten or fifteen years too late,” he writes.

In the second quote, Chomsky raises the possibility that despite the essential wrongness of the war, had the U.S. been able to secure “stability and order” in Vietnam, he might well have remained silent. Had the “fury and destruction” been transient enough, he might never have been moved, he suggests, to speak out against the war, at all.

The concept that Chomsky develops here still resonates and seems to apply decently well to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. After all, if Palestinians did not continue to resist Israeli occupation, if they did not engage in acts of “terror,” if they did not lob rockets from Gaza into Israel, if Israel were able to exercise greater control of the Palestinians, “had stability and order been secured,” others might not raise issues with the circumstances surrounding the creation of the state of Israel, might ignore the blockade of Gaza, might remain silent about the Occupation of the West Bank, might excuse the continuous process of expropriation and settlement on occupied territory. How unconscionable would that silence be?

Do some Palestinians lob rockets from Gaza into Israel because they want to awaken our conscience? Do they do so because they want revenge for dispossession, or revenge for the slaughter of innocents? Or because they hate Jews and wish to kill them? For an awakened conscience, aroused by the mortal threat and explosive power of the rockets, which questions have a higher priority? Do we condemn the rocket attacks and look away from the dispossession of Palestinians?

The biggest problem that I can see with the certainty that seems to characterize the two quotes from Chomsky is the apparent assumption that there comes a time when the moral question has been settled, a time when everyone must conclude that to argue any further that the dispossession of Palestinians is debatable “insults beyond measure the victims of our violence and our moral blindness.”

That statement is too absolute, too sweeping to be true. There were lots of reasons why people had not yet begun to oppose the Vietnam War in 1965, though Chomsky may be right in not excusing himself for his own too-long delayed opposition. And there are lots of reasons why supporters of the state of Israel remain unwilling to question the circumstances surrounding the creation of that state and all the violence against Palestinians that has happened since. But in my mind and heart we ought to be thanking the Palestinians who continue to resist because without that resistance the rest of us would almost certainly look away.

Passover and the Biblical Argument for Israel

Religious belief leads to bad policy, but remembering when we were slaves in Egypt might work

I've blogged about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 34 times during the past five years. The optimal time to do that probably is the week before Passover. After all, it is the biblical story of the Exodus that undergirds the argument in favor of the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. On that point, I've had plenty to say, but I've never gotten the timing right.

Even this year, I'm a good week late--the first Passover Seder this year was Monday night. And people who were looking last week for a critical perspective on Israel and Palestine are likely not hunting hard for commentary this week.

One traditional phrase from the Passover seder expresses the hope that the seder will be held "next year in Jerusalem." Indeed, these last many years a good number of seders have been held at various locations in Jerusalem (one wonders how the phrase is turned when the seder is, in fact, in Jerusalem). In any case, my personal, aspirational, Passover phrase goes something like this, "next year I blog about the biblical argument for a Jewish state in Palestine in a more timely way."

Yes, the phrase needs work. Maybe it should be something more like, "next year, blog in Jerusalem."

Regardless, I have argued before that stories Jews generally tell for religious reasons, during seders and otherwise, is not a good basis for making policy. Establishing a theocratic state on land occupied by others based on a history of events that didn't actually happen was, and is, an undemocratic and unethical way to proceed. In "Monotheism and the Accidental God," I put it this way:

"We live in a world substantially shaped by the bible, variously interpreted as it is by Jews, Christians and Moslems. Never mind that there is no archaeological or trustworthy historical evidence for many biblical tales. The foundational story of the Exodus is fiction, however much it might pain me to say so. The Exodus story, and, particularly, the commandment to remember when we were slaves in Egypt, with its implied obligation to side with the oppressed, has been the rock on which I've constructed my (mostly secularized) commitment to social justice. The human capacity for self-deception being what it is, the Exodus story doesn't actually need to be true for me to experience it like some sort of inherited memory. But it can't hurt, I don't think, to seek a better and richer understanding of how the Bible came to be the book that it is, and how and why it came to tell the stories that it tells.

Throughout the 19th Century and a good portion of the 20th, the relatively young science of archaeology was actually focused on proving that much of the biblical account of early history, since about 1500 BCE (before the common era), was accurate. But as the science grew up, archaeologists determined that there is no factual basis for the story of the flight of thousands of Jews from Egypt. There is very little evidence of the existence of Jews, at all, before about 1000 BCE, when they begin to turn up in some Egyptian and, later, Assyrian accounts of a tribal people living in the Galilee and the hills around present day Jerusalem.

There is evidence that there were, briefly, two Jewish states, Israel and Judah, but the northern state of Israel, larger, more prosperous and more cosmopolitan than Judah, was smashed by Assyrian conquerers around 800 BCE. After the disappearance of Israel, scribes in Judah, in the service of a likely real-life Judean king by the name of Josiah, wrote what would become the Book of Kings, a story attributing the destruction of Israel to the failure of the Jews there to properly honor Jehovah, a particularly intolerant and demanding god who found himself unable to abide the proximity of other gods. However vexing the worship of other gods was to Jehovah, it was a common practice in the polytheistic Middle East, and a practice tolerated by the kings of the northern state of Israel, who ruled over a kingdom much more diverse than Judah.

Theologians can argue the ways in which monotheism is superior to polytheism (and they do), but the Judean scribes had a much more practical interest in attributing the downfall of Israel to the worship of other gods and to the creation of graven images; they were primarily concerned with creating a rationale to support the reconquest of the Galilee by Judah, the home of the true and devout worshippers of the one god, the one who had promised the land to the children of Israel. Telling a story about how Israel broke faith with Jehovah, with the added implication that Judah had kept faith, made for good propaganda [at the time]."

As it happens, Biblical accounts of things still make good propaganda.  Almost 3,500 actual years after the supposed events of the Exodus, the justification for the establishment of Israel and its maintenance as a Jewish (theocratic) state is frequently based on the notion that Jews were promised the land of Canaan.

But even my version of so-called "real" events places Jews in the area a good, long time ago, when the southern Jewish state of Judah survived the destruction of the northern state of Israel. This is not such dubious history, and establishes the notion that the area was once a homeland for the Jews. One that was never forgotten regardless of the intervening history, a history that somehow became inseparable from godly promises and religious beliefs.

The real history of Jews in the Middle East is a legitimate basis for a "right of return" for Jews in much the same way that history justifies a right of return for American Indians and Armenians and Tibetans and Palestinians. But it does not justify the establishment of a state that privileges Jews on land most recently occupied by Palestinians.

If Passover seders are to teach us anything, I believe they ought to remind us that "next year in Jerusalem" has arrived, and some of us are celebrating religious feasts on land and in homes taken from Palestinians by force. It would be better to discuss what it ought to mean to "remember that we were slaves in Egypt," that we Jews were once enslaved and oppressed by a mighty and pitiless enemy. That ought to expand our understanding of "never again."

War makes us stupid—and violent

What if it is our collective violence that murders our children and teaches them to murder?

As Americans come to grips with Sandy Hook through various political and social debates about firearms and violence, we seem to have engaged every related subject except the one that might well be the biggest elephant in the room: continuous war and its effect on our culture.

After all, we have been at war in Afghanistan since 2001. This has not been the longest war in U.S. history; the Vietnam War deserves that honor, featuring as it did a decade of covert war making that preceded the significant troop deployments, which began in 1961 and lasted through 1975. Still, by other measures, and before the war in Afghanistan finally concludes, it may very likely turn out to be the longest sustained firefight to this point in American history and, combined with the second war against Iraq, which ran concurrently, the most expensive military action ever.

Yes, the cost and morality of these wars has been argued in detail, but their cultural impact has been examined only rarely. Gun control advocates tell us that two separate instances of American exceptionalism, gun ownership and murder rate, are linked. This seems a very defensible position, and a decent argument for more restrictions on gun ownership, but perhaps a more distinct instance of American uniqueness would be our history of aggressive military action and continuous war.

There may be other examples in history of warlike nations, but none whose wars, troop deployments and police actions have also received regular, sometimes hour-by-hour, media coverage.  Arguably, with the exception of a couple of years in the 1930s, when even feeding troops was a budgetary challenge, the U.S.military has been continuously deployed for aggressive action for more than a century. But Google “cultural impact of war” and you will find very little discussion of how war, war making, and preparation for war might predispose individuals in a society so occupied to engage in violence themselves.

Yet, we have been warned in a variety of ways to beware of continuous war. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four is the story of a society where language, politics and social life have been entirely debased by the theatrical propagandizing of war and what appears to be victimless virtual war.

And plenty of other books come to mind about actual war, both fiction and non-fiction, that have helped to clarify the ways in which war traumatizes the people who fight it, the people who are victimized by it, the people who survive it, the people who report it, the people who prepare for it, the people who witness it up close or at a distance, and the people who arrange for others to fight it. All Quiet on the Western Front, Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five, The Things They Carried and lots more are included in a more extensive list of anti-war literature that can be found on Wikipedia.

But the range of writing investigating the traumatic effects of continuous war on countries and cultures is much narrower. Still, an essay written by Simone Weil, The Iliad or The Poem of Force, written as Europe plunged into World War II, is helpful.

“Thus violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch. It comes to seem just as external to its employer as to its victim. And from this springs the idea of a destiny before which executioner and victim stand equally innocent, before which conquered and conqueror are brothers in the same distress,” she wrote.

“A moderate use of force, which alone would enable man to escape being enmeshed in its machinery, would require superhuman virtue, which is as rare as dignity in weakness,” she continued. “Moreover, moderation itself is not without its perils, since prestige, from which force derives at least three quarters of its strength, rests principally on that marvelous indifference that the strong feel toward the weak, an indifference so contagious that it infects the very people who are the objects of it.”

Weil is a difficult and demanding writer, asking the reader to follow chains of reasoning that are both complicated and precise. In her essay, Weil largely confines analysis of The Iliad to assessments of the effect of war on combatants, but any reasonable extension of her ideas suggests that some of the changes in feeling and behavior that war causes for warriors ripple through the society from which they come and to which they return as survivors of war.

American fighters returning home may suffer deeply from the traumas of war and of reintegration and inadequacy of services and opportunities at home, but we also celebrate them as heroes at football half-time shows and at patriotic celebrations and at political rallies and state of the union speeches. They have used force, to the extreme, in pursuit of policy goals and military objectives; they possess the “prestige” to which Weil refers.

By and large, the most celebrated athletes in our culture, like home run hitters and middle linebackers share a similar prestige based on the havoc they create. Football coaches are celebrated in the same manner as generals, at least until we realize that prestige is a garment that falls off as easily as it goes on, as has been the case with, say, a David Petraeus or a Joe Paterno. The same celebrity is conferred on high school jocks and, sometimes, neighborhood bullies, who often only lose prestige when they suffer defeat. Certainly many of us have memories of the indifference of the powerful towards the weak, memories from childhood, perhaps, or outside the experience of military service.

But imagine in a country where war making has been the rule, never the exception, for more than a century; consider the number of heroes and ghosts of heroes and suffering veterans who live amongst us. Ten million? Twenty million? How many children growing up with no fathers or, increasingly, no mothers? How many lost or damaged lovers? How many neighborhoods shared with one or a half-dozen disabled or severely traumatized veterans? How many of the millions of homeless on our streets are returned veterans or their brothers or their sons? And through our families and our communities and our emergency personnel and our treatment professionals we share the trauma.

Who wants to say that Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, was not a child of our many traumas, even of our wars?

Sometimes, especially for warriors, war is almost a delightful game, Weil tells us. “But with the majority of the combatants this state of mind does not persist. Soon there comes a day when fear, or defeat, or the death of beloved comrades touch the warrior’s spirit, and it crumbles in the hand of necessity. At that moment war is no more a game or a dream…And this reality, which he perceives, is hard, much too hard to be borne, for it enfolds death.”

Of course, the death of which Weil speaks can be consciously ignored, it can be fought off, it can be sublimated. But eventually death is all around and present, perhaps with varied and sometimes subtle effects on those who must confront it, embrace it, or pretend it is not there. Ultimately it is not there only for those who kill, or watch their comrades die. It is there for all of us, for those who attend military funerals, or comfort the survivors, or see them at a distance.

Nothing changes that reality, even for those who do not live near military bases or do not see the homeless vets around us. Advanced technologies do not change it; they only raise the price and, in many cases, increase the profits some of us make from war. Drone strikes don’t change it; do not wash President Obama’s hands of the blood of victims, innocent or otherwise. After all, violence makes even the victors equal with the victims, Weil tells us. And, as today’s Washington Post tells us, “More U.S. troops lost to suicide than combat in 2012.”

Ultimately, we may wish to exclude ourselves from Weil’s sweeping conclusions about warriors, but we do not live beyond the sweep of official violence and death. Our taxes pay for war and for our country’s war making capacity, and we pledge ourselves to our country and sing its anthems.

We know that “in war, truth is the first casualty.” Nevertheless, we most often tolerate the lies about weapons of mass destruction or Kuwaiti babies dumped from incubators. And, we even pray to protect our warriors at the expense of those on the other side. As Mark Twain put it more bluntly in The War Prayer,

“Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it…”

This was an American prayer long before Sandy Hook and still is. It is not our video games that are the first cause of our violence towards others and ourselves. More likely, it is our wars.

Conscience and Community

Humans are social animals. We form couples and, frequently, families. We gather in groups. Groups become tribes. Tribes establish communities and permanent settlements. Settlements grow into villages, towns and cities.

We connect these settlements with networks of roads, with means of communication. We speak to each other directly whenever possible, we carry messages between friends, we write, we phone. Increasingly we rely on new media, electronic media, and find new ways to build community.

And we worry about those left out. We visit the elderly. We create shelters and services for the homeless. We maintain libraries and free museums to create access to common knowledge and contact with others. We establish standards to make newer technologies more accessible. Some of this we do very imperfectly. But we do it.

In the process, we develop techniques for managing our disagreements. We delegate the responsibility for others to represent us when issues require discussion and when decisions need to be made. Wishing to remain connected to our community, to build a stronger community, we listen to each other’s arguments, sometimes carefully, and we respond, sometimes constructively; we modify our disagreements and search for common ground. We return to the same questions again and again, reopening old discussions, searching for better resolutions.

Much of this does not happen smoothly. We are different from each other in important ways. We vary in compassion and empathy. We vary in ambition and need. We vary in our native gifts and in our personal limitations. Sometimes our experiences and desires unite us to others, but separate lives and unique longings also divide us as individuals and as groups.

Very nearly all of us find ways to be part of a larger community; even loners do so. Most, if not all of us, will adjust our personal requirements, our demands, our disagreements, so that we might remain connected.

But there is the question of conscience. What role does conscience play in community? How do we develop one? How do we learn to make moral judgments, and to take action based on those judgments? How much will each of us tolerate before deciding to speak out? How much will each of us tolerate before taking action? Is the consensus surrounding us ethical? How would we know?