Goodness and Power
In his essay on “How to Raise a Boy” Michael Kimmel offers these answers to the question: “What does it mean to be a good man?” This list of attributes were offered by several thousand young men around the world to Kimmel’s question.
Integrity
Honor
Being Responsible
Being a good provider, protector
Doing the right thing
Putting others first, sacrifice
Caring
Standing up for the little guy
They were asked where they learned this? Their answer was that it was everywhere. It comes from Shakespeare, from Homer, from the Judeo-Christian heritage. It is absorbed from our respective cultures.
So what is the relationship between goodness and power?
In human society hierarchies exist as we are not all equally endowed with mechanical aptitude, with equal interests in say, the culinary arts, or in the intricacies of administration, or in the performing arts. The list could be quite long. Among all creatures, and especially in human society there are hierarchies of ability, intelligence, and power. People are not all equal. The ranking of these gifts, of these abilities is important for social order, and a just hierarchy is the ideal. This has to do with goodness, the practice of goodness by individual human beings. There is a need for moral law and for governmental justice.
So how did a individual so singularly bereft of moral sensibilities accede to the Presidency of this country?
How did one individual become so high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom on the scale of values? I mean “at the very bottom” to be lower than that of an animal.
2 thoughts on “Goodness and Power”
In Utopia, I’d expect the occurrences of goodness and power to correlate. But on Earth? Ha! Does one expect goodness from a bulldozer, a lightning bolt, a tsunami?
It is a hard lesson of adulthood, one that I’m still working on absorbing, that a person’s “goodness” as described in your post, may exist (or not) entirely independently of his/her ability to perform a given job well. Does any of us verify that a trusted auto mechanic also is up-to-date on his child support payments, and regularly telephones his elderly mother, before taking the car in for service? A stereotype surgeon has atrocious people skills, yet if her patients thrive, she keeps attracting more.
As far as I’ve been able to determine, our Current Occupant that you refer to richly merits the most searing personal condemnation I know: Poor Excuse for a Human Being. Yet to be fair, if at the end of his Occupation the U.S. and world are better off than before because of his administration, then he will justifiably go down in history as a successful Occupant, despite his personal unsavoriness. If. I-F …
I agree that morality, actions which promote the general welfare, if that is what is generally meant by goodness, does not appear to be linked to the exercise of power. Power may be utilized to beneficent ends or evil ends.
I cannot help thinking though that there is an inherent morality in doing any job well. I know a bit about auto repair. There is a difference between a repair that is “good enough” to pass a layman’s inspection to elicit payment, and a repair that is done with care, attention given to details that only a mechanic would know. I suggest that a crude term for this level of attentiveness would be “love.” A repair can be the focus of a high level of engagement, and that level of commitment is not unlike that exercised by a ballet dancer, or a master sculptor. The outcome is excellence, according to the purpose of the subject who undertakes the task. I think this applies to raising a child, running a company, or being president of a country.
I do not know the future. Who is to say that the USA will be in better condition and the end of the term of the current occupant of the White House? Time will tell. Seems to me that the odds are in favor of a much diminished condition of day to day life for many Americans, and a loss of the reserve of good will for us among other nations.