9UNP0171SD_Yi_Fu_Tuan_WordPress

- Good evening and thank you all for coming out tonight. I'd like to welcome you to this discussion with Yi-Fu Tuan, professor emeritus of the University Wisconsin-Madison and author of numerous books including "Topophilia," "Escapism," "The Good Life," and "Who Am I?" In his latest book, "Human Goodness," he poses a deceptively simple question. When we look around us and within us, what do we identify and recognize as good? What qualities unite good people and good actions across cultures and over time? That his answer is so textured and surprising is a testament, I think, not just to his scholarship but to his character. In Tuan's account, goodness takes many forms. It can be a kind of play, a code of behavior. Even a way of questioning and engaging the world. It's something that all of us can recognize, even in the midst of the suffering and doubt that seem to surround us. 

Now we live in an age of excess and inflation where "good" seems like a rather mild or modest compliment. Everything worthy of praise today has to be fantastic, or stupendous, or colossal. So, awesome. Gnar-gnar is the most recent one I've heard.

- What's that?

- Gnar gnar. I hope you won't think that I'm offering faint praise here when I declare that "Human Goodness" is a profoundly good book. It's one that can offer consolation, and inspire us to lead good lives ourselves. But perhaps most importantly, it's a book that can open our eyes to the goodness and beauty all about us. Please join me in welcoming Yi-Fu Tuan. 
(applause)

- Thank you, Chris. Rather than read you snippets from my book, "Human Goodness," I'd like to offer you a continuous narrative based on the book that will give you an idea of its major themes. The book is made out of four parts. First, isolated incidents of human goodness showing its variety. Second, goodness sustained over a period of years. Third, goodness sustained over an individual's lifetime. And fourth, what do I make of all this material? By way of introduction, let me say how I got onto this topic. I'm struck, like many other observers of the human scene, by the appeal of bad behavior. 

Newspapers, for example, invariably put crime on the front page. Whereas the good deeds, if they appear at all, are tucked away in the back section devoted to social gossip. Since publishers want their papers to sell, and since they have a pretty good idea of what their readers want, presumably readers, in general, also favor topics of gore to stories of kindness and valor. Do I share this appetite? Yes, to the degree that accounts of extreme evil do hold me enthralled. I'm morbidly drawn, like many others, to the horrors of the holocaust. But ordinary human flaws are, for me, simply boring. This is one reason why I cannot be a sociologist. I have no wish to spend a lifetime studying familiar human weaknesses and vanities. When I read fiction and find that it deals with peccadilloes of society, I stop turning the page. 

The same happens in real life. I've no patience for gossip. My objection being more aesthetic than moral. All the talk about who's up and who's down is as petty as it is --. But good people and good action make me sit up. I find goodness exciting, in part because of its variety. To show you that there is variety, I need to present different examples. The more the better. Time constraint, however, allows me to offer only a few, which rather works against my purpose. Still, even a few may suffice to suggest the variety. 

Moreover, they may prompt you to record your own encounters with human goodness. How will yours differ from mine? Try to imagine people gathering at water cooler or coffee table telling stories of courage, generosity, gratitude and other human virtues. It would be a refreshing change from the usually fare, wouldn't it? Now to my examples, my first is not perhaps what you expect, for it is good as good as babies and athletes are good. How are babies good? Well, take the father who calls his infant son "folds," because he's endearingly fat. The father runs his finger over the crease at the back of his son's head to feel the skin's silken warmth and to induce in him a dimpled smile. The father's appreciation is clearly aesthetic erotic but not only so, for the father is also deeply touched by a moral quality in his infant. Innocence. 

Given that athletes move with natural grace. Grace as in graceful is a term of aesthetic approbation. But it carries a hint of something deeper. Of being, for instance, in God's favor, of being in a state of grace. The literary critic George Steiner describes an incident from his student years at University of Chicago. He shared a room with Alphie, who had difficulties with his courses. In exchange for helping him through his courses, Alphie would show something to coach Steiner. Something I would never be able to match. Alphie crouched on the floor, stretched both arms in front of him in absolute tautness and leaped into the upper bunk. No -- has surpassed for me the explosive arc of that leap. 

Displaying a paratroopers perfect command over his tense size. Over the hidden coil in the small of his back. I stood transfixed, close to tears at my own awkwardness and at the bare beauty of that gesture. Good, thus far, is the good one finds in natural gifts. I now turn to something very different. Good as in good manners. Do good manners matter? Just how much do they weigh on the scale of moral values? Being good is, of course, more deeply grounded than merely having good manners. Which can be picked up from an etiquette book. 

Yet manners can and do seep into effortless habit. A style of being. And style, as the saying goes, is the man. When philosophers consider human goodness or morality, they seldom bother with manners. I do, because without them, without an active cultivation of them life is endless irritation and similarly conflict. With them, life can be bearable and humane, even in a richly hierarchical society. Consider 17th century France. What would French society have been like without the modifying influences of courtly etiquette? Louis XIV, the king, was well known for never passing a woman at Versailles without taking off his hat to her. And society was quick to catch on. 

To Madame de Maintenant, the most glaring evidence of her sister-in-law's vulgarity was that she would accept something at table from a footman without thanking him. In our time, Vaclav Havel, the first post-Communist president of Czechoslovakia, used his high political office to preach good manners and good taste to a country whose citizens were habituated to rudeness and tacky manufacturers. He said, and I quote, "No one can persuade me that it takes a better paid nurse to behave more considerately to a patient, that only an expensive house can be pleasing, that only a wealthy merchant can be courteous to his customers and display a handsome sign outside." I would even go further and say that in many respects improving civility of everyday life can accelerate economic development. I now turn to sentiments and behaviors that are more widely recognized as desirable. One is gratitude. Gratitude, said William Blake, "Is heaven itself." If so, why is it so rare? One answer is that few of us ever take time to think how much we are indebted to nature and society for all that we are and have. Thoughtlessness at this general level seems engrained in our being and makes us ungrateful. 

We may also actively repress gratitude because it obliges us to absolve the ills that have come our way, and so the pleasure of nursing them in righteous indignation. In good people gratitude is natural. Theresa of Avila was grateful for the smallest favors that came her way. Why, she said, she could be bought with a sardine. 
(laughter)

 We are not so easily bought. Another difference between her and us is that she shows her gratitude. With us, all too often, gratitude is just a nice, warm feeling that quickly fades when something else engages our attention. Theresa's deep appreciation for the gift of a sardine is a mark of her humility. Now, humility is a peculiarly Christian virtue. 

Ancient Greeks and Romans would have found it bizarre and so would hard-headed secularists of our day. It is certainly difficult to pin down. Is self-denigration humility, or is it just another way of boasting? Is courtesy humility, or is it just another way of showing off one's superior manners? What would be an example of true humility? Do the retirees of Florida fit the bill? They appear to be content playing endless rounds of bingo and golf. Isn't asking so little of themselves true humility? If so, saints with their high ambition are not at all humble. Mother Theresa of Calcutta urged her followers, and I quote, "To aim very high." 

Not to be like Abraham or David, or any of the saints, but to be like our heavenly father. God himself is to be our role model. Nelson Mandela is another -- saint demonstrably humble. Yet in his inaugural address of 1994 he says, and I quote, "Our deepest fear is not that we're inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we're powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world." 

Generosity, unlike humility, is a widely recognized virtue. Good people are generous. In his book, "Arabian Sands," Wilfred Thesiger tells several stories of the extraordinary willingness of sheep herders to part with what they have. One of Thesiger companions Ben, a boy almost destitute, gives away his shirt, and even his loin cloth simply because a man asked for them. William James, the great American philosopher, would have understood and approved. He once urged his readers to respond to what he called concrete claims. "Take any demand," James wrote, "however slight which any creature, however weak, may make. Ought it not for it's own soul's sake to be satisfied. If not, prove why not." People also give without being asked. 

And if what is offered is an organ of one's own body, the giving is heroic. Like many others, I was touched by a story reported in the "New York Times" a few years ago. A middle school student by the name of Michael Carter constantly fidgeted with his baggy pants in the classroom. To the annoyance of his teacher, Jane Smith, she asked him to stop. He replied that he couldn't help fidgeting. That he suffered from a kidney disease. And that he was on dialysis and waiting for a kidney transplant. Miss Smith said, "Well, I have two. Do you want one?" The story of the transplant quickly caught the nation's attention, in part because Michael is black is Miss Smith is white. 

Miss Smith couldn't understood why her neighbors and the media made such a fuss over her gift. It seemed to her the natural thing to do. Michael's mother was overwhelmed with gratitude. She thanked the Lord for that lady, for Jane Smith. She said she was getting bold, even tough with the Lord. Don't you ever let her want for anything, Lord. Don't even let her want for a Kleenex. 
(laughter)

 Courage. Can anyone be called good who lacks courage? 

One cold evening a man is crossing a bridge and hears a splash. Someone has fallen into the canal. The man who hears the splash can swim, but he does not attempt a rescue. Instead, he debates the pros and cons of taking action until it is too late to do anything. This story, from Albert Camus' novel, "The Fall," made me uncomfortable when I first read it in 1957. "I'm that man," I couldn't help thinking. The man I would like to be and can only be in my day dreams is Lenny Skutnik. On January the 13th, 1982, an Air Florida plane crashed into the icy Potomac River. Lenny Skutnik saw the accident as he drove along a nearby highway. He stopped his car, got out and dived into the river. 

At great risk to himself, he saved a woman's life. The hero had to be taken to the hospital for his body temperature had dropped dangerously low. When he eventually went home he was bombarded by questions from neighbors and reporters. Why did he do it? How was he able to muster the courage? Skutnik seemed puzzled. He said, "She was going under, I was right there watching. She was going to drown if no one moved. I jumped in." Besides physical courage, there's also moral courage, which, too, can threaten a hero's life for it's -- isolates him from his fellows, who supports his well-being and ultimately his life depends. 

The British writer Malcolm Muggeridge was physically brave. As a school boy, he once strode into the sadistic headmaster's office, snatched the cane from the hulky man that he about to use on a child's bare bottom, broke it in two and walked out. Even more admirable to me was Muggeridge's moral courage. Repeatedly, he told the truth as he saw it, even if this meant the ostracism of his peers and the loss of his job, which happened more than once. Since I'm an academic who has known what it is like to be pressured by activist students to support their cause, however poorly thought through, I'm particularly impressed by Muggeridge's ability to withstand such pressure which was, at its height, in the revolutionary 1960s. In 1966, Muggeridge was elected rector of Edinburgh University by the Student Representative Council, no doubt for his reputation as a maverick and an outspoken critic of the British establishment. The job of rector was largely ceremonial. It's one designated non-ceremonial obligation was to pass student's wishes and concerns to the university's governing body. Well, in 1967, the students wanted to have free pot and birth control pills on campus. 
(light laughter)

 Muggeridge received their request, but instead of dealing with it through the usual channels, he gave his response in his Annual Rectorial Address on January 14, 1968. Normally, rectors use this great public occasion to play to the gallery, especially to the students' gallery, for rectors, after all, were elected by students. This time, the new rector spoke like an outraged Old Testament prophet. He said that he would have understanding for almost any act of insubordination against the rundown, spiritually impoverished society that was Britain. "How infinitely sad," the new rector thundered. "How," in a macabre sort of way, "funny that the form student insubordination takes should be a demand for pot and pills. For the most -- sort of escapism and self-indulgence ever known. The result of any old slobbering debauchery anywhere in the world at any time. Dope and bed. When I read this account, I couldn't help wondering whether I, decked in rectorial robe would have the courage to face the shock of disappointment and disapproval. 

When by offering the usual problem of uplifting rhetoric, I could fill my ears with waves of applause." My point here is not, of course, whether I agree with Muggeridge's outrage. Rather, it is whether I have the guts to be unpopular when popularity is at my finger tips. The sad answer is no. 
(laughter)

 I have, up to this point, provided accounts of human goodness that are taken mostly from normal life, by which I mean life in a functioning civil society not actively engaging in war. Furthermore, there are mostly single instances of virtue. The question arises, how would the heroes in these accounts behave if they lived not in normal, civil society, but in one stained by totalitarian evil. Would their courage and generosity hold up if demands upon them occurred not once but repeatedly over a period of years? Doing good in the midst of evil, that's the story of the rescuers of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. 

The rescuers were a small minority. Why they did what most of their countrymen were unwilling or afraid to do remains largely unexplained. We do know, however, that the rescuers were an extraordinary mix of rich and poor, highly educated and barely illiterate, the religious and those who professed no particular faith. One trait they shared was the strong drive to help people in need. They all apparently had the imagination to see themselves in the needy. Most rescuers were nonpolitical. They did not act out of patriotism, internationalism, an abstract idea of the brotherhood of mankind. All saving a people called the Jews. When the Vichy police came for the Jews hiding in Le Chambon in southern France, the villagers innocently asked, "Jews, we don't have any Jews." They could profess ignorance without feeling that they had told a blatant lie, because they did not recognize the collective group. 

When they heard a knock at the door and opened it, they saw a particular man, a particular woman, a particular child. Human beings in need. And it was through these individuals that they said, "Come in." The rescuers did not expect to be thanked. An attitude we can better understand if we remember that they did not suffer the anguish of indecision. They never debated what they should or should not do, totaling up the costs of action and inaction, for they never felt they had any choice. Their moral freedom lay paradoxically in not having freedom. How anguish of choice is world's apart psychologically from joy of obedience is vividly illustrated in an incident that took place in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. A Dutch pastor came into a watch repair shop of the ten Booms. Corrie ten Boom, the daughter of the house and an active rescuer took the pastor aside and asked him whether he would take a Jewish mother and baby into his home, the safest place for them. 

Corrie brought the baby down for the pastor to see with his own eyes. She wrote, and I quote, "Back in the dining room, I pulled back the coverlet from the baby's face. There was a long silence. The man bent forward. For a moment I saw compassion and fear in his face. Then he straightened. 'No. Definitely not.' We could lose our lives for that Jewish child. Unseen by either of us, father had appeared in the doorway. 'Give the child to me,' he said. 

Father held the baby close. His white beard brushing its cheek, looking into the little face. At last, he looked up at the pastor. 'You say we could lose our lives for this child? I would consider that the greatest honor that could come to my family.'" The pastor's decision to deny help to the Jewish baby was moral, not only in his eyes, but also in the eyes of the people he served. As Christians, they no doubt all believe in helping the destitute and endangered. But at the gut level, they believed even more that their duty was first and foremost to their own kind. Corrie's father was the exception. From the viewpoint of his immediate kin, he might even be considered immoral. Confronted by a Jewish baby in danger of losing his life, Corrie's father willingly put his own family at risk and indeed thought it an honor to do so. 

We know that his family included a daughter, Corrie, who was, as we have seen, a rescuer herself. She certainly would have agreed with her father. But suppose the family had younger members. Were they brought up in an atmosphere of altruism also have intuited the rightness of their father's stance? Might they not even have felt a rush of pride? In a way, the ten Boom family was even more a family, more united by an ideal so ingrained as to need no righteous indignation than the pastor's family and those of his flock. The morality of the pastor is the morality of most of us, grounded in biology and common sense. Useful and necessary in ordinary times, under benign regimes. In abnormal times, and under vicious regimes, it is quite incapable of saving the victims of duly constituted power. For that, we need the transcendent morality of the ten Booms. 

An isolated good act doesn't make a man or a woman good. Heroic goodness sustained over a period of years as with the rescuers of Jews in southern France is more convincing. Still, I find myself wondering what the rescuers were like before the nightmare and what they were like afterward. With such question in mind, I started to read complete biographies in the hope of seeing lives whole. Let me give sketches of two lives chosen, in part, because they illustrate my point that good people can have very different temperaments and aspirations. My two good people are Albert Schweitzer and Simone Weil. Schweitzer was born in 1875, and died in 1965, at age 90. Weil died tragically young, only 34 years old, in 1943. They differed in many ways, as I shall show. But they also had similarities, which I will note first. 

Both Schweitzer and Weil were headstrong and showed, even in childhood, a passion for equality and justice. As a boy, Schweitzer refused to eat meat soup because it supposedly gave him greater strength and hence, an advantage in scuffles with classmates. He also refused to wear an overcoat because he noted his classmates, mostly village boys, couldn't afford one. The first time he refused, his father slapped his face. He refused again and again, and was slapped again and again. But he stood his ground. Simone Weil was even more extreme in her distaste for worldly goods and in her passion for equality. Astonishingly, when she, barely three years old, was given a large sparkling ring she declared, "I do not like luxury." 
(laughter)

 Her mother was a woman of high intelligence and common sense, who no doubt dressed her little girl in sensible clothes. 

Even so, young Simone found them too fancy. She wanted everyone to spend little on clothes so that at school or at work people would not be aware of difference in quality. Social justice for her wasn't just an abstraction, or a good and warm feeling. Even as a child, she wanted to see how it could be made to work. At age 11, she attended meetings of the unemployed. I find it remarkable, even incomprehensible, that a girl of her social class would want to use her free time that way. Given these early signs of social conscience, it is not surprising that Schweitzer and Weil as adults were driven to help those less fortunate than they. Schweitzer eventually found his calling as a medical doctor in Equatorial Africa, giving up in the process not only a brilliant career in theology and philosophy, but even, so he thought at the time, the music of Bach. Now, that arouses my deepest admiration. To me, it is one thing to forgo worldly goods and career. 

It is quite another to forgo something, music in the case of Schweitzer, that is more than life, that infuses life with meaning, depth and joy. Schweitzer made what he thought was the complete sacrifice. For what? For a simple purpose, which was to relieve the pain that he could see in all animate beings, but especially in the sick and exploited peoples of Africa. Simone Weil's path to goodness was quite different. At an early age, she was enamored with the beauty of the universe. Exemplary in its obedience to nature's or God's laws. This beauty, this goodness, she felt driven to pass to others. A professor of philosophy in the French Lycee, she was able to answer her calling in the classroom. But she taught, she gave all she knew indiscriminately to people in all walks of life with the urgency of someone unable to contend the riches that, to her own surprise, found a resting place in her. 

As for material goods, Weil lacked them despite her family's upper middle-class background. The little she had she passed on to others in greater need, as unobtrusively and naturally as water flowing downhill. Weil identified with farm and factory workers. She worked on a farm and in a factory partly to fill in her own body the harsh embrace of nature and the social order, and partly to find means to alleviate the harshness. Again and again, she brought the injustices and inefficiencies of the workplace to the attention of managers and owners. When these were brushed aside, she joined workers in organized protests. Political activism was undertaken on top of her duties as a teacher, which she took very seriously. Real -- giving, necessarily a source, the self, especially in one like Simone Weil who was never physically strong. Exhaustion contributed to her early death. Now, I'd like to spend a little more time, perhaps because I'm after all, a geographer, on one important difference between Schweitzer and Weil. 

And that is their attitude to nature. Nature to Schweitzer meant living things. To Weil, it was the universe. Schweitzer's moment of revelation came when he was seven years old. Here in Schweitzer's own words is how it happened. "Heinrich Brash and I had made ourselves rubber band sling shots, with which we could shoot small pebbles. One spring Sunday during Lent, he said to me, 'Come on, let's go and shoot birds.' I hated the idea, but I did not contradict him for fear he might laugh at me. We approached a leafless tree in which birds were singing in the morning air. Crouching like an Indian hunter, my friend put a pebble in his sling-shot and took aim. Obeying his look of command, I did the same with terrible pangs of conscience, and vowing to myself to miss. 

At that very moment, the church bells began to ring out into the sunshine, mingling their chimes with the sounds of birds. For me, it was a voice from heaven. I put the sling-shot aside, shooed the birds away so that they were safe from my friend and ran home. Ever since then, when the bells of Passiontide ring out into the sunshine and the naked trees, I remember, deeply moved and grateful, how on that day they rang into my heart the commandment, 'Thou Shall Not Kill.'" A seed planted at a tender age blossomed in due course to our world view that Schweitzer called "reverence for life." Only the word "view" is misleading, for Schweitzer didn't just entertain a view or idea, he practiced what he preached to the extent of making himself ridiculous in the eyes of his sophisticated fellows, such as picking up an earthworm that's astray on the concrete sidewalk and returning it to moist soil. More than any other thinker of his time, Schweitzer saw that each human being is the grave of thousands of living creatures. Our debt to them is beyond measure. He could also see that Christianity's singular failing is not recognizing this fact. Not giving it its due in the moral universe. As children, Schweitzer and Weil were raised in an atmosphere of intellectual and scholarly contention. 

With, however, this difference. Schweitzer's home had an aura of piety. The issues raised at the dinner table, rigorously debated, were theological and moral. The atmosphere in Weil's home was more abstractly intellectual, and owed much more to ancient Greek. Held for wonder were heaven, the stars and their underlying laws of motion. As a little girl, Simone thrilled to sunsets. Whenever she heard that one could be seen, she would rush to see it. As for the earth, mountains and ice fields held her enthralled. At age 16, she and her family went to the Alps for their holiday. There, Simone saw ice fields in the midst of towering mountains for the first time. 

They inspired in her a feeling for purity that remained with her for the rest of her life. Similarly inspiring to her was the purity of mathematics. Simone's elder brother, Andrei, was mathematically precocious, as Pascal of our time. The sister, inspired by Plato, Archimedes, Pascal and her brother, saw a glimpse of God's own mind in the austere beauty of geometric relations. At other end of nature's scale were flowers and butterflies. Four-year-old Simone and seven-year-old Andrei, during a Swiss holiday picked flowers and caught butterflies as children may do. They immediately released the butterfly for both were full of pity for living things. Still, for all her pity and admiration for living things, Weil never used her intellectual gifts to articulate a coherent thesis in regard to them. A blind spot she inherited from her two primary sources of inspiration, ancient Greece and Christianity. I presented human goodness as isolated incidents, as group efforts sustained over a period of years and in the life stories of two individuals. 

Let me now see how they fit into a moral universe made up of the good, the bad and all moral shades in between. When friends knew that I was writing a book on human goodness, they look at me as though I had lost my marbles. 
(light laughter)

 How can I, or anyone, possibly overlook the pervasiveness of evil in the world? I do not overlook evil. Indeed, I see it as the dark backdrop against which truly good people and good acts are little more than points of light. The dark backdrop is not all black. It is themed with gray. Gray is the word I use for the complex mixes of good and bad in day-to-day living. The good part is the pleasure of being alive. 

And it is also the mutual help that must exist for humans and animals to form families and communities and so, promulgate the species. The bad part is the unavoidable tension in all communal arrangements, in all social institutions and the numerous ills to which the body is heir. Gray periodically turns into pitch darkness of evil. A condition unique to humans. For by evil, I do not so much mean the killing and pain that creatures inflict on one another in the struggle for survival, as the psychology, the envy, jealousy, hatred, greed or sadism that make human lives and theirs alone satanic. Calling human goodness points of light emphasizes its rarity in space. Human goodness is also rare and seems to appear in bursts punctuating the flow of regular and steadier events. The philosopher Karl Jaspers famously identified a period in world history that he called the Axial Period dating from 800 to 300 B.C. Included in it, are such luminaries as Homer, Isaiah, the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Zeno. In different ways, they lifted the human spirit to new heights. There was only one Axial Period if Jaspers is to be believed. 

Other times have also had their luminaries, if not in quite such a dense cluster. Jesus, who gave us the Sermon on the Mount, was certainly a luminary. As for axialty, calendars in most parts of the world are to this day, divided by his brief time on earth. Skipping the centuries to our own time, I consider Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Nelson Mandela and Simone Weil as leading lights. Who, each in his or her own way, offered us a new understanding of goodness. Gandhi, in his use of pacifism and peaceful protest, protested to right wrong. Schweitzer, in his reverence for life. Mandela, in his demonstration that reconciliation and forgiveness not only are sublimely moral, but can also be powerful political tools. Weil, in her embodiment of incandescent intellect and superordinary charity makes us wonder anew what a child of God is like, what a human being can potentially be. Up to now, I've concentrated on good people who are stars, points of light, conspicuous even when they do not wish to be so. 

Another type of goodness also transcends time and place. The goodness of the obscure and humble. The metaphor, points of light, is clearly unsuitable here for a distinguishing mark of their goodness lies precisely in not shining. But what are they like? Literary works offer examples. Melville's sailor, Billy Budd. Dickens' maidservant and nurse Peggotty. Tolstoy's virtuous peasants come to mind. They all have a child-like quality. They all seem solid, without the void at the core of being that taunts the more self-conscious. 

They're so unworldly that they could seem retarded, simpletons, God's fools, yet wise because they are free from the distorting lenses of power, wealth and prestige. In Western literature, figures of goodness have been influenced by Jesus' preference for children to the pretentiously learned. Children, rather than doctors of the Torah of philosophy are likely to be the first to enter the Kingdom of God. In the non-Western world, Taoism and then Buddhism exert a similar influence on literature and society, teaching their adherence to see wisdom in a hermit singing in the rain, a monk eating a watermelon. People without much formal learning. Is this anti-intellectualism? It is. But only if we recognize a certain brittle showiness, a tendency to mistake obscurity for profundity in much of our intellectualism. We should recognize that simplicity of the humble is not at all the same as simplemindedness. Simplicity, which supposedly lead to wisdom, cannot have deficiency of intellect at its core. 

What does lie at the core is a receptive attitude to world. A childlike wonderment that is itself a mark of intellect. A condition for knowledge. By virtue of these qualities, the simple and pure in heart have access to certain kinds of truths about nature and society that are closed to the stupid. Stupid is a harsh and damning word. By it, I mean not so much low mental endowment as a severe constraint in outlook, more or less self-imposed, that has a source in insecurity and fear. There is hunger for goodness. Perhaps there's always been such hunger. At the same time, there's the fear of being duped. That fear hinders us from recognizing true goodness. 

When we read about it, or when we encounter a saint in life, we're tempted to assume a benign, yet at bottom skeptical attitude to avoid the appearance of naivety. Significantly, whereas we are all prepared to talk at lengths about morality and ethics, we are reluctant to consider human goodness. The one can be done impersonally. The other forces us to consider real men and women, and moreover confronts us with the awkward question of our own goodness. Another reason comes to mind for our reluctance to speak up. This reason does us credit for we may have wondered, doesn't it take one to know one? For me to talk about goodness, isn't there a presumption that I not only know about the subject matter, but that I am, in some sense, good? No one will challenge my credentials to pontificate on evil. For on evil, I, like my fellow sinners, have an insider's knowledge. But goodness and being good? 

Happily, there is a difference between being good, which is rare, and something much more common, namely the ability to recognize goodness when it stands right before us. How can we tell? Speaking for myself, I'll say simply this. I can tell. For in the presence of a truly good person, I feel I've become a slightly better and more intelligent person myself. In the murky confusions and compromises of life there is certain clarity in charity, a hint of heaven. 
(applause)

- Do you have time to entertain a few questions?

- Sure, sure.