Thank God You're Alive!

My wife was watching “The Heiress” (Paramount, 1949) on Turner Classic Movies a few weeks ago, but couldn’t stay up for the whole thing.

So  I went online looking for it, to see when it might be on again…

Turns out: It’s a movie version (and not the first) of Henry James’s novel Washington Square.  Olivia DeHavilland and Montgomery Clift.  I didn’t watch it, but from what I gather, it’s about:

Young woman falls for a dashing young man, who’s clearly interested in her only after discovering that she’ll inherit millions, once her father dies.  The dad (Ralph Richardson), of course, sees through it all right from the start, but he’s powerless to convince his daughter of the young man’s insincerity.

I found myself thinking that, in Henry James, it’s always all about nuance.

In the sense that, given an imperfect world, we’ll never marry someone who’s perfect, so one must choose one’s mate based upon degrees of good and bad.  Good and bad qualities, good and bad characteristics, a mixture of good and bad behavior.  I guess: what you’re willing to tolerate.

In a way, it’s a belief that life is always a compromise.  You want rich: you might have to settle for not-so-handsome, or not-so-interesting.  You want love: you might have to live in a garret.  Life’s always a trade-off.

And so the trick is to discern the subtle degrees of acceptability.

With Jane Austen, in the end it’s always all about love.  Finances, pedigree be damned.  But in the real world, Henry James’s world, you’ve got to choose between various imperfect creatures, and so you’ve got to be able to juggle a very complicated ”algorithm.”

Which leads me to the basic point of the new book I’m working on, The Time To Decide.

I’d think that we’d all agree that certain situations or actions are totally unacceptable.  Like slavery.  Racism.  Enforced inequality of the sexes.  The list doesn’t go on and on, but there are certain societal actions, certain institutions which are flat-out wrong(by today’s standards, not by yesterday’s or perhaps tomorrow’s), and about which one simply shouldn’t compromise.

How do you compromise over genocide?  How do you compromise over forced child prostitution?  How do you compromise over… not letting a colored family move in next door?

The argument of the new book is: We’ve gotten so accustomed to all the various excuses/explanations/justifications for one human killing another, that we’ve come to accept the  reality of everyday murder (or whatever name you want to use for any particular instance) without once questioning whether there might be an alternative.

In the book, you’re presented with an alternative scenario:

What if human beings, 1000′s of years ago, had collectively decided that the conscious, willing taking of another human life… was simply unacceptable.  Ever.

So much for “compromise.”  So much for “nuance.”  Is this “a pipe dream”?  Is this “utopianism’?  Is this “naiveté”?  So was racial equality.  So was gender equality.  So was freedom of speech, for that matter.

Ideas are of their own time.  Slavery still exists (travel in Africa if you don’t believe me), but as the economic necessity for it and as alternative political systems render it blatantly shameful, it’s practiced only out-of-view of the wider world.  Racism still exists, even more obviously, but one can hope that it, too, will fade from moral/ethical ”fashion”.

So why not killing?  Why are we still so thoughtlessly willing to accept the fact of everyday killing, as if there were no alternative?  (Much as the pharoahs wouldn’t questioned slavery.)

Why is killing still a basically human default?  The knee-jerk solution to conflict?  And when will that begin to change?

Assuming that it will change, someday, when exactly are we predicting that will happen?

And is it gonna happen all on its own?

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