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Jonathan Lear and Andrew Sullivan

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from: Jonathan Lear

Confusing Morals With Public Relations

Posted Tuesday, Aug. 21, 2001, at 7:25 PM ET

Andrew:

High tide in P'town. I have a memory from teen-age years of sailing a Sunfish in P'town harbor and being "rescued" by Robert Motherwell in his motorboat. It was a high wind, he was looking out through his binoculars and thought I was in distress. He ruined a perfectly thrilling sail. That summer I was working as a short-order cook at a greasy spoon on Commercial Street that no longer exists. I'm tempted to write a book, Everything I Ever Learned About Academic Integrity, I Learned Behind a Grill. Actually, I did fantasize about becoming a conductor. I loved having five different orders of two eggs each on the grill at more or less the same time, the nerves of steel required to push down a professional toaster and really wait until the last minute to put on the eggs, the joy of it all coming together at the same moment. At the end of the morning I would have cooked 12 dozen eggs--and it felt like a morning very well spent.

None of the above is true. Just kidding; it's all the way it happened.

Actually, I don't think it is all right to have a professor making up tales about himself in the classroom. But in this case I do think that moralizing has gotten hopelessly confused with public relations. How would the case have been thought about if an utterly minor academic was involved, no publicity, and his tall tales had come to a dean's attention? Given the publicity, and given the president of Mount Holyoke's unfortunate first remark criticizing the newspaper, there had to be a public ritual of purification--a "katharsis" as we say in my trade. The respectability of Mount Holyoke needed to be seen to be reaffirmed. What we witnessed was anthropology, a dramatic ritual of "moral condemnation"--not anything that was genuinely in the register of ethical life.

You mention Bob Kerrey--and that seems to me such a deep and sad moment in American public life. My dear friend Socrates was always walking around the marketplace asking any comer if he knew what courage was. An interlocutor would say, "standing fast in front of the enemy," and Socrates would give an instance of standing fast in front of the enemy that was foolhardy and not at all courageous. And so it would go. I think of Bob Kerrey going to Vietnam wanting in his heart to be courageous but having no real idea what that meant. He trusted his elders, his country, his military superiors to have the answer. But at some point in the middle of the night, while slitting a poor woman's throat, he must have literally come face to face with the sickening fact that this could not possibly be what courage is. It is so sad and so sickening. And its meaning has not begun to be plumbed.

Well, that should cheer you up! What else should we do for fun!

Jonathan

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Jonathan Lear

Confusing Morals With Public Relations

Posted Tuesday, Aug. 21, 2001, at 7:25 PM ET
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Jonathan Lear is a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Andrew Sullivan writes daily for andrewsullivan.com, writes the "TRB" column for the New Republic, and is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine.
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