The Importance of Decency
This is an excerpt from Andrew Sullivan’s Substack. We urge you to read the whole piece there.
“Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does,” wrote George Orwell. It’s from his essay, “The Lion and the Unicorn,” which was a prose-poem in some ways to the quiet virtues of his native England. It so affected me that I actually remember the moment I was reading it. I was a 13 year old on the top deck of a double-decker bus, the windows opaque with condensation, the air thick with cigarette smoke, the skies dark outside, rain falling steadily, making my way home from school.
Decency. This was Orwell’s deep theme . . . Orwell saw it primarily in ordinary people, especially the English, and rarer among intellectuals: “It is not easy to crash your way into the literary intelligentsia if you happen to be a decent human being” . . .
. . . Decency was something Orwell found among the men and women he fought alongside in the Spanish Civil War, among the homeless and poor in Wigan, and amid the flower-loving, stamp-collecting Englishmen in their home-castles: a recognition of our shared brokenness, which begets a very basic human compassion.
I love this passage, from his review of Gandhi’s autobiography:
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.
. . . Orwell saw decency in all mankind, but . . . he recognized its particular cultural power in English civilization:
. . . In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them.
This is one reason why Britain did not succumb to fascism, when everyone else in Europe did. I’d argue further that the American experience is more influenced by this English sensibility than by any other from outside itself.
“Justice, liberty and objective truth” are still believed in here among ordinary Americans. There remains a common aversion to cruelty, unfairness, extremism, and lies in our everyday lives. It has its roots in Christianity—as liberalism does, as we are beginning to understand better. But it can endure without religion as part of a culture. And this commitment to decency is, as in England, an invisible but vital bulwark of democracy itself.
Democracy requires decency because it requires mutual respect: to defend others even as we disagree with them, to accept decisions others have made and elections we have lost, to distinguish between robust rhetoric and dehumanizing cruelty, to accept objective truth when it proves us wrong, to maintain a baseline of civility, to accept the we are all in this together. Politics is inextricable from culture, and a decent culture will sustain democracy while an indecent one will ultimately unravel it. . . .
. . . Donald Trump is the most indecent man, by far, to ever hold the presidency. He has openly mocked the disabled and the sick; he has reveled in stories of torture and murder; he has spent decades grabbing women “by the pussy” and bragged about it; he has derided prisoners of war … for being captured. He parlayed his own divorce into tabloid coverage and spoke publicly of wanting to date his own daughter. He began his political rise by pushing a Birther conspiracy he knew was a racist lie. We have become inured to his references to “shit-hole countries” and “the 51st state” and “Gavin Newscum,” to a misogyny that made Jeffrey Epstein a close friend. . . .
Stay decent and see Trump for what he is. In Orwell’s words:
Either power politics must yield to common decency, or the world must go spiralling down into a nightmare of which we can already catch some glimpses.
Have you glimpsed enough yet?