Notes of a Moral Compass
The world seems to be growing increasingly complex, or maybe, it has always been this way and my antennas are just now perking up. Regardless, the more you know, it seems, the less you understand. And in response, there is this urge, so deeply conditioned it feels primal, to take the inputs of the world, dissect and reassemble them into neat pieces, and use them to construct a moral compass. But lately, the arrow on my compass feels like it’s spinning off its hinge, pulled in every direction by the Earth’s magnets, depending on what book I read, who I spoke with, or what general global travesty occurred today.
As my friend Jonathan recently put it, “We hear that it's too expensive to transition to clean energy while our tax dollars continue to prop up the fossil fuel industry. Our public health system is being systematically dismantled just a few years after over a million Americans died of COVID. Universal healthcare is a pipe dream but there is always money for bombs. Millions are struggling with utility bills and rent and giving up on their hopes of owning a home one day—that central pillar of the American dream—while corporations gleefully squeeze more and more value out of us. The president preaches peace while bringing war at home and around the world. We hear about "freedom" but see our civil liberties rapidly slipping through our fingers, families separated and locked away in warehouses, and our communities ripped apart.”
Like Cassandra of Troy, it can feel like a curse to hold the truth, to be yelling into the void, trapped in trying to make sense of the contradictions. The moral compass working overtime, spinning arrhythmically in search of true north. And yet the pull to compartmentalize, to make sense of the world through analysis of right and wrong, carries on. James Baldwin writes, in his essay Everybody’s Protest Novel, “Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a breakdown of meaning. Those categories which were meant to define and control the world for us have boomeranged us into chaos; in which limbo we whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions.”
So I’ve been thinking a lot about contradiction lately.
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I’ve known the name James Baldwin since grade school, but we were never required to read his writing. He was filed away in the broad category of black writers, which I naively equated with civil rights activists, because how could you be black, celebrated in our history, and be anything else? I came across him again in 2020, as excerpts of his texts and clippings of his talks perforated through the black squares and protest-speak of Instagram that summer. And all I could think was “bars”. Admittedly, even then, I didn’t dig deep enough.
Over the years though, I had identified Baldwin-sized gap in my knowledge of literary and cultural critics for some time, and had made a few trips to Troubled Sleep, a well curated used bookstore in Brooklyn, blasting NTS radio on most days, to see if I could chance upon a collection of his work. I read The Fire Next Time and Go Tell It On The Mountain, gorgeous tapestries of life told through vivid portraits of Black American characters. Now, I’m reading a used copy of Notes of a Native Son and while I’m still thinking “wow, bars” on every page, I’m also feeling challenged, validated, conflicted and confused.
In his unpacking of what he calls the protest novel, specifically Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Native Son, James Baldwin writes a flaming critique of social protest novels, literature designed to instigate the social conscious about the horrors of slavery but in his view, lacking in a deeper analysis of the humanity that exists inside and behind slavery’s victims. The protest novel, in Baldwin’s view, is socially conscious propaganda, a surface level exploration of the symptoms of racism in America, while lacking in an analysis of the systems and humans that are at the core of those symptoms. The protest novel is a convenient categorization of right and wrong, ignoring the complexities, traditions, and experience of the humans and their choices that have led to the racially charged environment that persists, even today. It isn’t so much that these artifacts of history are wrong in their takes, as much as they are propaganda of another form, reactions to their own political climates. In short, they make the social issues of their day bite sized and oddly palatable in their disgust of slavery.
Another James, this time a C. Scott writes in his book Seeing Like A State, “the aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'.” The protest novel, according to James B., could be read as James S. describes, “a project of internal colonization.” The persistent charge to categorize right from wrong, while absorbing inputs that are pleading for us to live and act in the grey, creates turmoil and tension in the moral compass, throwing the arrow off its axis. And it refuses us the opportunity to truly understand the issues at hand, to have agency in how we want to act, while recognizing the challenges we face in trying to live a morally sound life.
And so we’re left with “do what we think is right” meets “do what we can.”
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I think James Baldwin would be appalled by the ways in which I discovered his work. Social media has replaced the “protest novel”, providing the most surface level take, often out of context, to try and explain the circumstances that have led to our current truths. Ironically, in 1949 he wrote, “Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussions of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.”
I take this critique as a challenge to dig deeper, to find my own truth in the contradictions of the world around us. And to use that truth to guide my own work and impact; I often return to thinking through my own spheres of influence, resisting the overwhelm of trying to solve the world’s problems (despite social media telling me it is all my concern, all my responsibility).
In actually reading James Baldwin’s essays for the first time, I’m finding that he captured my sentiments, in better language than I could ever, almost 80 years ago. He writes, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.”