The End of Right and Wrong?

NEW YORK, JUNE 17

There's a mini-blizzard going on that questions whether our moral sanity is askew. Let me illustrate.

1. On Sunday, Dan Rather has as his guest Stephen Jones. Mr. Jones is the man who defended Timothy McVeigh. It is a remarkable performance, in which Jones emerges as a masterly thespian. He even obliges CBS by pretending to have become unaware of the camera's presence while he more or less practices his charge to the jury urging it to spare McVeigh the death house.

Then later he takes Dan Rather's questions. Rather asks whether Jones will agree that blowing up an office building and killing 168 people can be classified as an "evil" deed. Jones equivocates. Rather asks, Assuming McVeigh did do the deed, which was of course the verdict of the jury, would Mr. Jones then agree that he committed an evil act? Well, Jones says, McVeigh is not an evil person. The viewer is left at the mercy of the syllogism: a) McVeigh is not an evil person, b) If McVeigh was responsible for the Oklahoma bombing, then c) that bombing was not evil.

What could Dan Rather do in such a bind? Shoot the mouthpiece?

2. James Q. Wilson, the illustrious professor of political science currently at UCLA, has a new book called Moral Judgment, subtitled, Does the Abuse Excuse Threaten Our Legal System? In his preceding book, The Moral Sense, Mr. Wilson argued that the basic difference between right and wrong--between evil and goodness--inheres in human understanding. He is troubled by the apparent failure of some Americans to cope bluntly with the distinction. He cites the case of the Menendez brothers. There was no question that they had emptied a shotgun into their mother and father. But explanations given by the defense counsel succeeded in causing enough jurors to believe that the brothers were incompetent to judge right and wrong, to bring on a divided verdict.

3. We learn from The Free Press publishing company that David Gelernter of Yale University, a brilliant specialist on computer science, has written a book called Drawing Lip. Listen to the publisher's letter: "On June 24, 1993, David Gelernter opened a package that exploded, blowing off most of his right hand and damaging his hearing, eyesight, and chest. Ironically, the perpetrator, the Luddite `mad genius' we know as the Unabomber managed to punish one of the very few people who is [sic] deeply skeptical about computers and openly critical of technology. In a haunting memoir, Gelernter makes a metaphor of himself, seeing in his own near death and recovery the same disfigurement and promise for American society as a whole. As he ponders his own spiritual blindness, and the healing power of family, religion, community, and art, he critiques the American soul and its devaluing of these very treasures.... Americans have made a media circus out of evil."

4. And from the gifted writer and social critic Florence King, writing in these pages. "The Nineties have blurred the original distinction between sympathy and empathy and the dictionaries have followed suit, but just for old times' sake, here it is: We sympathize with people whose troubles are different from ours; we empathize with people in the same boat. `I feel your pain' is empathy, but `I can imagine your pain' is sympathy."

"The people most likely to go on an empathy jag are those who personalize every problem, reduce every experience to its most pedestrian component parts, and get so caught up in the particulars of a situation that they cannot see the universal principle. Reading Margaret Carlson's column [in Time magazine] on Lt. Kelly Flinn is like reading half of Charles Lamb's essay on roast pig: we are left wondering whether the Chinese peasants will ever figure out fire, or will they just go on burning down their barns whenever they want cooked meat. Painting Lt. Flinn as the victim of `a louse so low he makes George Costanza look like Sir Galahad,' Miss Carlson asks: `Why wasn't she given counseling, a reprimand, or reassignment?' Reassignment? Doesn't she know that no matter where they stationed her, every wife on the base would empathize with Catherine of Aragon?"

Tough stuff, but how badly we need it, in an age in which there are those reluctant to consider McVeigh evil, confused about whether the Menendez Brothers should be restrained, worried about the Unabomber's psychological privations, and incapable of frowning on the conduct of Miss Elinn.