Before and After

Items for a notebook or workbook of amoralist illustrations and exercises.

1. The Duel

I was telling an acquaintance A about an episode with my older stepson S, shortly after my marriage to his mother and our all moving in together, when we were all about to set out on a drive and S, as he was accustomed to do, commenced to jump into the front passenger seat next to his mother, who was at the wheel of her van. I said, “Whoa. You’re in the back,” or something to that effect. Naturally I assumed I would be sitting next to my wife and the child (a preteen) would be sitting in the back.

            But S would have none of it. So I playfully challenged him to a duel, and we physically wrestled with each other for pride of place. But the struggle was in fact deadly serious – downright archetypal, I realized in the midst of it. This led me eventually to write about it as an exquisitely moral dilemma. My conclusion was that there was no pat resolution – this even before I became an amoralist.

            Oddly I cannot remember how the episode ended. I assume I mounted the front seat. But when I told A that I couldn’t remember how it ended, he scoffed.

            So now I am writing about this for a different reason: to illustrate how moralism and amoralism work. This time it is not the episode just recited but rather A’s scoffing that I will zero in on. I can see a moralist responding to the scoffing like this:

“What, you don’t believe me?”

“You know how it ended. You just don’t want to tell me.”

“So you are calling me a liar?”

“Oh, don’t make a big deal out of it. I just think you’re embarrassed about what happened. I’ll bet the little fellow won the tussle and you ended up in the back seat.”

“So you don’t think lying is a serious charge?”

“Of course not in this case. I’m just ribbing you.”

“Then that must mean you might also lie to me and others on occasion? That never would have occurred to me. I don’t think I want to associate with people who think little of lying.”

End of good relations with A. In ye olden days either might have challenged the other to a duel. (So a duel prompted by a story about a “duel.”)

            The amoralist would handle it all quite differently, thus:

“What, you don’t believe me?”

“You know how it ended. You just don’t want to tell me.”

“Not so. At least not consciously. Who knows, maybe my unconscious is censoring my memory.”

“I think you’re embarrassed about what happened. I’ll bet the little fellow won the tussle and you ended up in the back seat.”

“Could be … but my impression is otherwise. Anyway, to me what’s interesting is that the dispute has no resolution on the merits. Do you think it does?”

            And so on. In other words, the amoralist brushes off any egoistic concern about his own integrity or how he is being perceived, and instead returns the focus to the matter that intrigued him in the first place, namely, if there is any just resolution to such a situation. He suspects that there is not. And instead of feeling upset and antagonizing someone, he has now enlisted another person in the examination of this issue. Win-win.

 

2. Oral Concerns

            Let’s raise the ante. Nothing was at stake in the previous example except someone’s (mine, as it happens) pride. Here is an episode where something of more objective concern, although still relatively minor, is involved.

            I was sightseeing in England and wanted to send some postcards, so I went into a rural post office to purchase the stamps. To my amazement the clerk passed the stamps to me under the window with the sticky side down. I was certainly approving of the stamps not being wrapped, as they are in the U.S. That’s just good ecology, reducing waste and toxins. I suppose the same could be said of the stamps not being self-stick. But then to slide them on the counter surface, with the side you have to lick picking up whatever dirt and germs lay on that counter, struck me as absurd.

            A moralist might speak up as follows:

“My good man [putting on some British airs], how long have you been working here?”

“14 years, sir.”

“And in all this time it has not occurred to you that your customers would not want to lick something you have just scraped over a countertop?” [And perhaps punctuate with “you twit.”]

            Honestly I cannot imagine what the clerk would say, or how he might have reacted. The English are often very polite and humble (or ’umble), so perhaps I need not have worried about offending. As it was I said nothing, and in fact was bemused. I must have been in a when-in-Rome sort of mood, which is close to an amoralist one. So I was even impressed that this way of handing over stamps could be a very healthy practice since it helps the population build their immunity.

It would have been interesting, however, to hear what reason the clerk had if he had one. Perhaps he handed them over randomly, sometimes face up, sometimes down. Perhaps he figured, or had been instructed, that handing them over face up would provide a double-check to the transaction by enabling the customer to see exactly which stamps they were getting. Meanwhile the hygienic aspect may simply never have occurred to anybody before.

            In an exactly analogous situation I once observed my late friend and colleague David Morris address a young lad behind a CostCo food counter, who handed David a plastic cup with his bare fingers holding the rim rather than the base. “I say this lovingly,” David began. “Hold the cup by the bottom and not where someone will be placing their lips.”

            David had an amazing knack for keeping conversations on an even keel. Although I must say that even he had his share of enemies, there being individuals who will brook no contradiction no matter how gently and well-meaningly expressed. (Students are often unable to accept anything less than an A, period.) Nevertheless, I admired his genuinely caring nature, and saw that he did obtain positive results from deploying it.

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