PERSPECTIVE ON MORALITY : Be Not Seduced by Those With Conscience : Many adopt the term, either long after any risk of doing so has passed, or to mask dark motives and bloody projects.
How is conscience recognizable? Not simply through acts of grit--the wicked too are dauntless--but through timeliness and discrimination. Raising one’s voice at exactly the moment when that is hardest to do; and knowing that one thing is not another thing.
A statement of conscience that fails to come on time is worth little or nothing. Nations that were perpetrators, or collaborators, or merely indifferent during the hell of the Holocaust, and that today openly sympathize with the victims of 50 years ago, are crying weightless, cost-free crocodile tears. Remorse is sympathy too long delayed to matter. Conscience means risk available to the hour’s need. And when, as is the fashion, a futile remorse over the dead Jews of Auschwitz is combined with up-to-date ideological assaults on the living Jews of Israel, conscience is surely on holiday.
As for discrimination, or knowing that one thing is not another thing: No one can be said to own an actual working conscience if the intelligence in control of that conscience is willing to engage in moral equivalence. To put it as plainly as possible: When one group targets another group for annihilation, then the situation between these groups cannot be described as a “conflict,” since conflict implies, above all, equality of motivation.
There is a difference between uncontainable hatred and the response to it; between aggression and defense; between the will to dismantle sovereignty and the will to build just boundaries. When that difference is negated or blurred, conscience is severely impaired, however noisily it may claim itself whole and robust. Moral equivalence--the forced equation of unlike intent--achieves the greatest moral deformity of all; it holds the defenders responsible for the attacks against them.
It may be useless nowadays to speak of conscience, in any case--at least not without irony. Apart from movements like Hamas, which openly and directly espouse butchery, every faction on the face of the Earth has by now learned the lingo of conscience. Conscience, let us say, is a smash hit, a worldwide success.
No cause, however dubious or murderous, neglects to present itself as an issue of conscience. Particularly in phrases such as human rights, this internationalized vocabulary of conscience has thrown a seductive luster over dark motives and bloody projects. What does it mean, for instance, when Jordan announces a conference on human rights open to all, with the exception of anyone who has even visited Israel? What does it mean when, on American television, Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi, a professor of literature, eloquently places the cause of Hamas within the cause of human rights? Or when Edward Said, a literary critic, exculpates--in the name of the French Resistance--the outright murder of Arabs by other Arabs?
Now more than ever, I believe, we have reason to suspect men and women who are declared to be, or who define themselves as, writers of conscience. What is called for is not generalized praise for this moving idea, but high caution and determined specificity.
Can a writer who has earned international admiration as a dissenter, yet once informed for the secret police, figure as a writer of conscience? What, concretely, lies behind the beautiful words? Exactly what past or contemplated actions? The real danger to language--and writers live by language--will not be found in the horror of terms like ethnic cleansing; there is, in such openly repugnant verbiage, the twisted virtue of honest speech. One knows, as one knew it with “Mein Kampf,” as one knew it with that novelist and playwright Goebbels, that what is said is what is meant.
In today’s media-flattered arena of sophisticated duplicity, it is the noble phrases, the noble words, the noble ideas, that can be far more destructive, because they are the most mendaciously insidious. The truest words--the very words hammered out in the white-hot smithy of human conscience--can themselves be made to bear false witness. Resistance, moral intervention, national liberation, human rights, freedom, self-determination. What person of feeling and compassion, what sensibility given to justice and hope, can stand against the power of these summonings to high conscience?
It is not impossible that we may yet come to fear the easy use of the word conscience more than we fear the words ethnic cleansing. With the latter, the label warns of the poison within. But what if the label is universally celebrated as beautiful, and lethal pellets lurk behind the inspiring design? The intellectual posture of both writer and reader ought perhaps to be that of wariness: Approach with caution.
The distinguished Canadian novelist Robertson Davies reminds us that “the writer is an artist, and as such his task is to seek and make manifest what Joyce has called the radiance of all things.” And just here, to my mind, in this alluring and visionary loveliness, is the heart of our peril.
Writers are artists who are compelled by the beauty of language and of aspiration--but in the language of politics, where lives are at stake, all things are not radiant. Or, rather, seeming radiance is not enough; radiance can lure and mislead. Sometimes it is more fitting for the writer to resist the haloing of all things, especially when that nimbus appears to reflect a sweet conviction of one’s own nobility. Particularly with respect to political conscience, the writer (and certainly the publisher) would do better to borrow from the Hippocratic oath of the physician, which--like Hillel’s formulation of the Golden Rule--is also couched in the negative. First, do no harm.
If conscience has a cause, here it is. And if a cause is to have a conscience, here it is.
