My Word's Worth: an occasional column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #45, October 1, 2000

DRIFTING INTO VIRTUE

I was reading recently about a new fashion among Mormons -- wearing rings and bracelets engraved CTR, for "Choose the right." It made me think about how much easier it is to do the right thing -- especially the difficult right thing -- when you are surrounded by people who encourage you to make the right choice. Or, at the very least, discourage you from the wrong choice. When I was a kid, we never got into too much trouble because we knew perfectly well that someone would tell our parents if we did. We could even stave off bullies sometimes by shouting, "I'm gonna TELL."

When I got married at City Hall in Chicago, I was told that most non-church weddings end in divorce. Looking at the other couples waiting in line for the judge, I could see why that might be the case -- most of them had nobody with them. They were lonely people who had found each other but had nobody else.

That meant they didn't have parents and grandparents and friends watching them exchange their vows, the people who are a built-in cheering section, encouraging them to stay together, and helping them get through the rough patches. A marriage needs the protection of friends and family who interpret each partner to the other, who fill in a little family history when needed to explain why he regards her telling his secrets as a betrayal, or why she feels so insecure when he talks about past girlfriends. Many couples divorce after a tragedy like the loss of a child, because they have nobody but each other for comfort, but each are too locked in their own pain to offer that comfort to the other. The family and friends who hold their hands, listen to their grief, give them hugs, can make all the difference in the survival of the marriage -- they make it easier for couples to choose the right, to remember that they did love each other and that it's worth the effort to work things out.

When I reading Stephen King's The Stand, I was struck by his clear belief that most of us are morally neutral, capable of either good or bad depending on what our environment encourages. That's why his cynical heroes acted so quickly to build a framework for their new society that made it easy for people to cooperate, while the satanic anti-hero was building a society on fear that encouraged treachery, viciousness, and slavish obedience to his orders. I think King may be right. Most of us don't have the kind of moral certainty that enables a Ralph Nader or a Martin Luther King to stand up for the right no matter what. We may think of these people as saints, but we may also find them uncomfortably priggish and humorless.

Many of us have done things we regretted because we couldn't resist the social pressure of the people around us. Perhaps we drank more than we wanted to because people kept on handing us full glasses, or taunted a homely girl because the popular kids were doing it and we wanted to be part of their crowd. Perhaps we have been silent when people near us made ugly, racist remarks. Maybe we shoplifted or knocked over mailboxes because our friends were doing it. Many of us have said nothing when we knew our friends had done something wrong.

That being the case, it makes sense to design an environment that makes it easier for all of us to choose the right.

Among the Mormons, of course, it's easy not just because of those CTR rings but because of what they represent: they are taught to view the world as a place where one makes moral choices and serves the community. They have an available vocabulary for discussing morality, that many of us did not grow up with. And they are surrounded by people who know them and will notice if they do wrong.

Those of us who still live in small, middle class communities have the same kind of encouragement to make good choices. If the most respected people around us are building habitats for humanity and serving in volunteer fire departments, we will volunteer ourselves. If the cool kids collect food for the homeless, the other kids will do it too.

That doesn't mean that those good choices are inherently appealing. We Americans have a powerful strain of raw self assertion which we glorify under the name of individualism. We admire it because it has in fact led to some remarkable achievements -- the exploration of the west, for one thing, an unparalleled history of invention for another.

But it has a social cost. Rampant individualism breeds an impatience with anything that restricts our choices -- family obligations, financial responsibilities, rules, or laws or community disapproval. It breeds an unwillingness to make the slightest personal sacrifice for a greater good. We have a history of running away from problems rather than sticking around for the harder work of solving them. When we didn't like the increasing disorder of our cities, we moved to the suburbs. When our suburbs started having their own problems, we moved to new suburbs farther out. Eventually some of us even moved to gated communities.

But the suburbs many of us escaped to are not communities. They have no center, no parks and playgrounds, no place for people to meet and talk about common problems. They have no ready network of caring adults for the community's children to learn from. The spread-out homes are designed for privacy, not neighborhood, and to respect individual choices, not enforce community values. Not only is it possible to not know your neighbors, it is possible to not know that one of them is running a meth lab in his garage or selling child pornography on the internet.

When many middle class families abandoned the cities, they took with them not just the tax base, which paid for police protection, but also their informal enforcement of civil behavior, which communities rely on for crime prevention. Even a crowded noisy tenement can encourage people to choose the right if it's full of people who win respect by working hard, paying their bills, taking care of their families, and contributing to the community. But when everybody who can afford to flee to the suburbs does, neighborhoods no longer have a majority of people who will discourage our worst instincts. As the streets become scarier, people retreat indoors for safety, and with nobody watching, criminals and drug dealers and prostitutes can take over.

The battle for the soul of a neighborhood need not be permanently lost, though. New York City, which had become known for its crime, dirt and disorder, has revitalized neighborhoods and parks and even Times Square. It happened because the police and city government created an environment that discourages petty crimes and public nuisances. By cleaning up grafitti, patrolling parks, arresting squeegee-men and fare-beaters, and forcing panhandlers to move along, they have made people feel safer. By putting police back on foot patrols, where citizens could get to know and trust them, they have made people feel safe enough to come back out on the streets, where they can monitor what's going on. That critical mass of observers is an even more powerful encouragement to do the right thing than the presence of uniformed officers.

I'm not talking about enforcing a crushing conformity. It seems to me that raw individual talents can bloom as flowers or as weeds. When we build a community, we replenish the soil, sprinkle plant food, and drive away the marauding pests. We build a world that encourages those who think to choose the right consciously, and whose currents are strong enough to push even the rudderless toward virtue.