is morally defensible. In the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, a prison guard is about to punish Paul Newman by locking him in a sweltering box and explains, “Sorry, Luke, I’m just doing my job. You gotta appreciate that.” Luke replies, “Nah—calling it your job don’t make it right, Boss.”
Less often, an author can shake readers into realizing that conscience itself can be an untrustworthy guide to what is right. Huckleberry Finn, while drifting down the Mississippi, is suddenly racked with guilt over having helped Jim escape from his lawful owner and reach a free state.
Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn’t sell them, they’d get an Ab’litionist to go and steal them.
It most froze me to hear such talk.... Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger, which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm....
My conscience got to stirring me up hotter than ever, until at last I says to it, “Let up on me—it ain’t too late yet—I’ll paddle ashore at the first light and tell.” . . . All my troubles was gone. I went to looking out sharp for a light, and sort of singing to myself. By and by one showed....
[Jim] jumped and got the canoe ready, and put his old coat in the bottom for me to set on, and give me the paddle; and as I shoved off, he says, “Pooty soon I’ll be a-shout’n’ for joy, en I’ll say, it’s all on accounts o’ Huck; I’s a free man, en I couldn’t ever ben free ef it hadn’ ben for Huck; Huck done it. Jim won’t ever forgit you, Huck; you’s de bes’ fren’ Jim’s ever had; en you’s de ONLY fren’ ole Jim’s got now.”
I was paddling off, all in a sweat to tell on him; but when he says this, it seemed to kind of take the tuck all out of me.
In this heart-stopping sequence, a conscience guided by principle, obedience, reciprocity, and sympathy for a stranger pulls Huck in the wrong direction, and an immediate tug on his sympathy from a friend (bolstered in the reader’s mind by a conception of human rights) pulls him in the right one. It is perhaps the finest portrayal of the vulnerability of the human moral sense to competing convictions, most of which are morally wrong.
REASON
Reason appears to have fallen on hard times. Popular culture is plumbing new depths of dumbth, and American political discourse has become a race to the bottom.206 We are living in an era of scientific creationism, New Age flimflam, 9/11 conspiracy theories, psychic hotlines, and resurgent religious fundamentalism.
As if the proliferation of unreason weren’t bad enough, many commentators have been mustering their powers of reason to argue that reason is overrated. During the honeymoon following George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001, editorialists opined that a great president need not be intelligent, because a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to the triangulations and equivocations of overeducated mandarins. After all, they said, it was the Harvard-educated best and the brightest who dragged America into the quagmire of Vietnam. “Critical theorists” and postmodernists on the left, and defenders of religion on the right, agree on one thing: that the two world wars and the Holocaust were the poisoned fruit of the West’s cultivation of science and reason since the Enlightenment.207
Even the scientists are piling on. Human beings are led by their passions, say many psychologists, and deploy their puny powers of reason only to rationalize their gut feelings after the fact. Behavioral economists exult in showing how human behavior departs from the rational-actor theory, and the journalists who publicize their work waste no opportunity to smack the theory around. The implication is that since irrationality is inevitable, we may as well lie back and enjoy it.
In this section, the last before the concluding chapter, I will try