![]() ![]() Didion considers how this tendency has made us less moral rather than more: Half a century later, Didion’s point seems all the more disquieting amid our present culture, where the filter bubble of our loyalties has rendered in-group/out-group divisiveness all the more primitive and where we combat our constant terror of coming unmoored from our certitudes by succumbing to unbridled self-righteousness under the pretext of morality. Except on that most primitive level - our loyalties to those we love - what could be more arrogant than to claim the primacy of personal conscience? ![]() Maybe we have all said it, and maybe we have been wrong. And, as we are rotely and rather presumptuously reminded by those who would say it now, Jesus said it. “I followed my own conscience.” “I did what I thought was right.” How many madmen have said it and meant it? How many murderers? Klaus Fuchs said it, and the men who committed the Mountain Meadows Massacre said it, and Alfred Rosenberg said it. With an eye to our tendency to mistake for morality what is indeed a “monstrous perversion” of the ego, Didion writes: Joan Didion, 1977 (Photograph: Mary Lloyd Estrin) December 5, 1934), a writer who has spent a lifetime mirroring us back to ourselves, examines with characteristic incisiveness in a short 1965 essay titled “On Morality,” found in Slouching Towards Bethlehem ( public library) - the classic 1968 essay collection that gave us Didion on keeping a notebook and her timeless meditation on self-respect. In consequence, any true morality is the diametric opposite of self-righteousness - the very thing that so often masquerades for morality. But if beneath the world “morality,” as James Baldwin asserted, “we are confronted with the way we treat each other,” then to be a moral human being requires an especial attentiveness to other human beings and their subjective realities. ![]() “To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention,” Susan Sontag wrote in what remains some of the finest advice on writing and life. ![]()
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