Decency

Someone on Bluesky recently said that we really need a return to decency. I apologize to that forgotten person for not linking that thought here, but it got my gears turning about decency (what we probably should be cultivating) vs. empathy (what we keep saying we should be). And I strongly agree.

Back during the Obama administration, I had a conversation with friends where I stated that I really didn't care if someone was racist behind closed doors so long as they were afraid of being racist in public. My reasoning was (and is) that I just don't care very much about what's in people's souls, I care what they do. Do I like people being bad racist people (or homophobic or misogynistic or any variety of hateful)? No. But I can't really control that and to think that I can is a little too evangelical to me. Really, depending on how cynical I'm feeling on a given day, the fixation on what's secretly in the hearts of evil people seems like a marker of just how total the capital E Evangelical victory was in the 2000s. We're all didactic readers, we're all worried about the content of the soul. I don't have much time or patience for that.

What struck me about the call to decency was that it inadvertently drew a sharp line between decency and empathy. The liberal-left pretty much won on empathy and, despite all the terrible things of the past ten years, still holds an edge. The syllabi are mostly the same, the libraries mostly still have the same books, the viciousness of this terrible decade is immensely unpopular, therapy is still a boom industry. Despite that edge, we still lost in most of the ways which matter and things are getting worse.

Empathy seems like something you feel more than do, and I'm including the phrase "cultivating empathy" here. And feeling more than doing seems of a piece with the broader Western left-liberal trend of calling to something people already are, or at least already should be. Which isn't to say that empathy is bad: we should absolutely be empathetic. But ultimately it feels like it's really about the self, the me, and that it radiates outward.

Decency, on the other hand, is something you do and it insists that others do similarly rather than hoping they'll see the light. You will behave decently or there's a cost, and I behave decently because there's a cost to me. When we come together, we both behave decently for those same reasons. What is happening in America right now isn't because of a lack of empathy (the right is extremely empathetic toward their own communities), but because of a lack of decency. These are indecent times, top to bottom.

Not for nothing, the first serious batch of Epstein emails are out and there doesn't seem to be a great lack of empathy in them, monstrous as they are. They share empathy and affection for one another. I am struck by their indecency, and by the indecency of a society which refuses to hold indecent people to account.

Decency is a code, which is maybe why it fell out of fashion. The left doesn't love codes. It loves rules, but it doesn't have much time for codes. It's too close to wielding power.

There all sorts of critiques one could make of this. Who decides the code? How closely does it hew to outmoded ideas of how to act? Can anyone act decently? Ian, how do you, yourself, act decently? Isn't this all a bit Kantian?

Yeah. I don't know. I have, with the various stumbles everyone has, tried to behave decently. I try to treat people how I want to be treated. I try to cultivate a little stoicism. I make rules for others (in class, with my kid) and take them seriously, but never so seriously that I can never bend them when decency calls for it. I take pride in my work and extend that pride to others. I don't lie. I admit when I make a mistake.

All of those seem like decent things to do. I don't know how much they have to do with empathy. But it is, always, unceasingly, an act of doing, one grounded in not just my material interests, but in a common set of material interests I share with others.

Bourgeois ideology? Maybe. Like I said, I don't know. Not many people got a code to live by anymore.