“Drawing Life”

 

Back in the late nineties, David Hillel Gelernter, an associate professor of Computer Science at Yale, authored a book titled, Drawing Life; a title that immediately drew me in when I spotted it on the bookshelf at the local bookstore.

Some of you may recall Gelernter, one morning in June 1993, was nearly killed by a mail bomb. The perpetrator was the infamous Unabomber, who killed 3 people and wounded 23 others between 1978 and 1995 by sending exploding packages through the mail.

As American journalist Richard Bernstein recounted in a 1997 New York Times review on Drawing Life, “Mixed in with this personal story is Gelernter’s other theme, namely that America suffers from a moral laxness that disarms us in the face of evil and weakens us in other areas of life as well, like . . . plain common sense.”

As one reader pointed out, Gelernter “wades into the current ‘politically correct’ academic world with guns blazing and a ‘take no prisoners’ attitude that is all too often lacking from those on the political right, who seem too intent on appearing moderate and in the process lose all sense of outrage.”

It seems–a quarter of a century later–we wake up to outrage on a daily basis.

Bernstein portrays Gelernter as one who “writes sparsely and bluntly about the transformation which has taken place in America since the 1960s. Traditions and restraints have been broken and putting things back together will take a long time and a lot of perseverance.”

Upon reading “Drawing Life” I was struck by Gelernter’s deeper concern with the general lack of moral foresight or discernment that existed in the ‘90s.

Another reader observed, “We have spent our grandparents’ moral capital and have surrendered traditional values to the new intelligensia.”

“The blast that injured me was a reenactment of a far bigger one a generation earlier,” Gelernter writes, “which destroyed something basic in this society that has yet to be repaired.”

“That other blast, he avows, was the 1960s-era takeover of the American elite by intellectuals and their soggy conviction that tolerance is the supreme value, a tolerance that cripples our ability to be judgmental [discerning] when we should be judgmental [discerning].”

Bernstein’s article concludes, “From his complaints about the press, Gelernter goes on to a more wholesale condemnation of elite opinion and to his theory that the elite has been ‘intellectualized.’ Not everyone will agree, but as he makes his argument and as he cites specific enraging instances, Gelernter places himself squarely and admirably in the great American tradition of zestful, wholesome, contrarian outrage. We need people like him to awaken us from smug, self-regarding orthodoxies.”

Migrating from Gelernter’s excursions of thought to today’s cultural landscape, we can–without difficulty–see that normative ethics concerning how we ought to behave have all but disappeared in today’s present political climate, tastelessly conspicuous during the dishonorable and odious hearings on display at our Nation’s Capital these past weeks.

Gelernter’s personal crusade to heal a morally bankrupt culture appears to have had little effect, even though he presented his ominous warnings with forceful eloquence . . . born out of his personal encounter with evil.

In 2007, American psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, Philip Zimbardo suggested that people may act in evil ways as a result of a “collective identity.” This hypothesis was published in the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. The book won the American Psychological Association’s 2008 William James Book Award.

The first chapter focuses on the book’s title theme of Lucifer and on the nature of moral transformation as an outcome of the interplay between individual disposition, situation, and systems of power.

Professor Rose McDermott–a fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences who has authored over two hundred academic articles encompassing topics such as emotion and decision making, and the biological and genetic bases of political behavior–wrote that the book “deserves to be required reading for all those interested in the intersection of psychological processes and political reality.”

Ever hear the term “realpolitik”? Realpolitik is politics based primarily on considerations of given circumstances and factors, rather than explicit ideological notions or moral and ethical premises; in other words, it’s subjective or situational . . . that cavernous: “it all depends.”

In fact, Realpolitik political philosophy advises politicians to explicitly ban absolute moral and ethical considerations from politics, and to focus on self-interest, political survival, and power politics, which they hold to be more accurate in explaining a world they view as explicitly amoral and dangerous.

More and more we are living the consequences of such a belief; the world is becoming more and more amoral . . . and dangerous.

It couldn’t be more apparent . . .

“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.” – Martin Luther King Jr.