Moral Deafness: The Responsibility to Respond

There’s a sad and powerful scene in a famous literary work that illustrates vividly the human condition I want to talk about today.  The condition is called, “moral deafness,” and the illustration comes from Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust.

In that scene, Charles Swann, the hero, knowing that he has an incurable disease, pays a call on his friends, the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes, who are preparing to leave for an evening of entertainment.  Always looking for diversions, the elegantly dressed Duchess insists that Swann, who she admits does not look well at all, accompany them on their next trip to Venice.  “But my dear lady,” the gentlemanly Swann replies after a pause, “by that time I shall have been dead for several months.”

Outside, the Duchess’s carriage is waiting.  Her husband begs her to hurry.  Caught between the demands of her social life and this sudden confession of a dying man, the Duchess makes the only choice she has ever learned to make: she chooses not to hear.  “You must be joking,” she says, and steps toward her carriage.

At that moment, the Duke sees that his wife has committed the gravest error a fashionable society lade can make: her black shoes do not match her red dress!  “Go upstairs quick and put on red shoes,” her husband commands her.  The aristocrats can find no time to comfort a dying friend, but the carriage can wait while the lady changes her shoes.

The author Diane Cole refers to this scene in an article published some years ago for Ms. magazine, that she titled “The Responsibility to Respond.” (Ms. magazine, December 1986)  The Duke and Duchess, says Diana Cole, epitomize a particular kind of self-absorption that allows them simply to block out bad news and proceed with the mundane and petty concerns of their lives, unaffected by people in crisis around them.

“Out of fear, ignorance, or sheer indifference,” writes Cole, “they seek to escape the demands made by any human bond of friendship or love.  Their hearts remain closed; their imaginations refuse to reach outside narrow limits. Only their lives matter; other people’s suffering lies beyond their ken, beyond their care.”

Examples abound of such “moral deafness” (or its equivalents, “moral blindness” or “moral insensitivity”) both in literature and history.  On the day of Czar Nicholas II’s coronation, there was a terrible riot scene among the crowd of thousands of peasants who came to view the pageantry that day in St. Petersburg. The throng panicked, and in the ensuing stampede, hundreds of people were literally trampled to death.  It was a horrible, unforeseeable tragedy, which would have been bad enough for the Russian people to absorb.

What burned the event into the psyche of Russia’s peasant class, however, was the decision of the newly crowned Czar and Czarina not to allow this unspeakable tragedy to delay or in any way postpone the grand coronation ball at the palace that evening.

So while hundreds of Russian families were numbed in grief for the loss of loved ones that very afternoon, the international aristocrats, the visiting royalty of Europe’s crown families who had assembled  for the occasion, were busy choosing the proper colored dancing shoes to match their priceless gowns.  The astounding imperviousness of the Romanovs to the suffering of their nation that day was, for many, the final proof of their moral bankruptcy, and eventually sealed their fate.

On a much less histrionic scale, most of us can think of times when we have witnessed, or even participated in the callused ignoring of someone’s pain.  Diane Cole recalls examples from her own life when friends around her seemed afflicted with the same moral deafness as the Duke and Duchess.  She remembers once writing a litter to a friend named Ned.  “Dear Ned, we’ve had bad news.  Peter has cancer. The doctors say he has a reasonable chance, but it’s hard to be cheerful, and hearing from a friend helps. Please write soon.”

She mailed the letter in February, and heard nothing back.  She received a response in August.  After plowing through several pages about the busy life of an up-and-coming young lawyer, she came to the postscript:  “I assume that by now Peter is fine.  Please give him my best and write again soon.”

“Perhaps we must be taught, says Diane Cole,  – by parents, friends, or plain bad luck – what it means to be human.  Ned’s privileged young life did not seem to prepare him in any way for empathizing with Peter’s illness, or with the family’s pain around that event.  How else to account for his deafness to a friend’s critical request?

Or perhaps you’ve had a friend or two like Jill.  When Diane called to tell her she had had a miscarriage, Jill exclaimed, “How terrible!”  And then she began a rapid monologue of the troubles that had befallen her that week – her boss kept her late, her husband was sulking, and her brand new car was in the shop.  And in addition to everything else, she just couldn’t throw off a cold. Moral deafness.

In the movie, “A Civil Action,” (which I heartily recommend to you) there’s a pathetic scene where the lawyers are explaining to the families who have lost children why their court settlement will be so meager.  “We tried really hard,” says the lawyer.  “We’re not happy either.  We’re losing out too.  It cost us a lot to take this on…..” And one of the mothers who has lost a child silences him.  “How dare you even begin to compare your pain to what our families have been through!”

To be so self-absorbed that we think the petty problems of our day-to-day living can actually compare in any way to the pain of someone else’s genuine life crisis or loss, is a kind of moral deafness in itself.

Or consider another kind of moral deafness, from seemingly kinder souls who at the first glimmering of bad news, burst out with “Oh don’t you worry now, everything will turn out all right!” There’s no way they can know that, of course, but such a response is not truly meant to comfort or recognize a cry of anguish.  It is simply another way of brushing past – or brushing off – what one does not want to hear, something one does not want to deal with.

How does one learn to shrug off other people’s grief with such aplomb?  The duchess, Ned, Jill – but all of us, let’s be honest.  Far easier to name the faults of others than to own up to the same failures in ourselves.  Where do we acquire this human moral deafness that permits our oblivion to the pain around us, or right in front us sometimes?

As teachers and prophets have been trying to pound into our thick skulls and hard hearts from time immemorial, to respond to one another is a basic human responsibility.  This is the basic ethical contract we have among and between us all in this life.  The responsibility to respond.

It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about one to one, about person to person, or nation to nation, or people to people.  And it refers to everyone on this crowded and star-crossed globe.  It is what Jesus, to name one teacher, was pointing to in his parable of the Good Samaritan.  This is the understanding on which it all hinges: families, basic relationships, friendships, communities, institutions, governments, nations, civilization itself.  The responsibility to respond.

Not just to our own kind, but to everyone.  Not just to the good news, but also to the trials and tragedies, great and small, that we all of us encounter.  To hear each other, see each other, feel for each other, to share with each other, not just the joyous and celebrative, but also equally the painful and the fearful, the difficult and the disappointing, the frightening and sometimes overwhelming substance of living and dying as human beings.

I think it’s true to say that some people seem afflicted with moral deafness while others, for some reason, always seem to know how to respond to another’s suffering.  Cole says of these people that bad news does not make them deaf.  “They extend themselves instinctively,” she says, “extend, reach out, enlarge their vision to include another’s vision.”

I don’t think it is solely a matter of mere sensitivity.  Certainly some among us are more attuned to others around them.  But there’s a cultural dynamic to be considered here, too, a dynamic that permits us at times to abdicate our responsibilities to each other without true accountability.  I’m suggesting that there is a basic accountability to which we must be called by each other in tones loud enough that none can claim moral deafness as an excuse.

Charles Swann is too much the 19th century gentleman to call the Duke and Duchess back from their carriage to confront them with their appalling lack of response to his pain.  Too bad for them.  For if he had confronted them, and if they had then responded, they might have saved their souls.  They might then have redeemed their characters and their petty trivial lives.

And when Ned’s letter arrived, six months late and conspicuously inadequate in its answer – Diane Cole does not tell us in her article if her outrage ever impelled her to confront her friend to bring home to him the utter poverty of his ethics and the shallowness of his caring.  We do not know if Ned was ever called to account for his moral stone deafness, or ever challenged to overcome it, or ever given the opportunity to redeem it.

I’m suggesting that there are no authentic human relationships that do not entail a reciprocal accountability of honest response and reaction.  And when this accountability to each other is missing, or is forfeited out of some sense of misdirected politeness, moral deafness is one result.

We are accountable to each other for the quality of our relationships.  And because we are human and fallible, every one of us, and because we sometimes lack courage or common sense, and because sometimes we are just not paying close attention to each other, there are times when we utterly fail to hear each others cries, see each others tears, notice each others fears.  There are days when we are all guilty of worrying more about the color of our shoes than the human beings right in front of us asking for our care and attention.

It isn’t easy to confront a friend’s moral deafness to our situations. It takes courage to do that.  But if we are lucky, someone is just brave enough to call us back from our carriages, and say to us, “I don’t think you’re listening.  I need your help here.” That’s the moment of redemption between people, you see, when we are called upon to respond.

It isn’t easy to say that to a spouse or a partner sometimes.  It isn’t easy to say that to a parent or to a child or to one’s whole family sometimes.  But that is the moment, if we’re brave enough to engage it,that is the moment when love is really possible between people.  That is the shining moment when it is truly possible for people to speak truth between them.

It is a terrible thing to turn away from the gift of such a moment when it is offered to us by another.  But sometimes, sad to say, people do turn away from redemptive moments.  That’s when relationships truly die.

There is a bias to this sermon, as you can plainly tell.  In a way, I suppose it is the same bias that colors almost every sermon you are like to hear from a Unitarian Universalist pulpit, at least from this pulpit and from this preacher.  For I believe that people are obligated to one another.  I believe that if there is any kind of divinity at work in the world, it is in this obligation that it resides.  I believe we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.

I believe we are all obligated to hear each other in times of distress, but more, we are responsible for correcting each other when that hearing is impaired.  I believe this is part of our basic compact as a loving community, to call each other out of our moral deafness.  To call each other back from the carriages that would carry us away from caring for each other.  To call each other to account for the level of love and justice and empathy that exists between the peoples of the world.

If there is a God at work in the world, then I believe it is in that calling to each other that God lives.  And if there is no God, then our calling to each other is all we have.